Happy Hour #10 - Vendors, Logistics, and the Flaming Lips (Patreon)

As I sit down today and look back over the last two weeks, I remember so many small interactions—from me and Troy in the office, to meetings with Erik Mona and Jason Bulmahn at PaizoCon, to camping out in Glass Cannon HQ and talking to a members of the Naish about what our shows mean to them. It is a tapestry of business and creative and personal that has started to blur a line that was once so clear. The separation between work and personal life used to be well-defined for me, but now things are different. I’m happy about it, don’t get me wrong, but when I sit down to write a column about a week of work, inevitably the personal sneaks into the narrative. So here it is, a bit of all three—business, creative, and personal—to round out your work week before we head out for the weekend.

The countdown to Gen Con has begun. We are a mere two months from the most important business opportunity of our calendar year and there is a boatload that needs to be done. As I struggled through my Seattle jet lag combined with my post-PaizoCon depression this week, I worked backwards from the day of our flights out to Indy to determine each of the most important deadlines that we’ll need to hit for various plans to come to fruition in Indianapolis. The simplest of these projects is new merch. Indianapolis will be the first city to see two Glass Cannon Live! shows in one weekend (I call Thursday night the weekend—what can I say, I like a party). Take that, pair it with Gen Con, and it’s a huge opportunity to share some new ideas we’ve been working on with the Naish. However, what we want to happen and what will happen are two different things separated by a seemingly bottomless ravine of vendors and logistics. 

We were excited to bring the Praise Log shirts out to Seattle since it was the Pacific Northwest chapter of the Naish that first embraced the "cult." It was two full months between the Portland show and the Seattle show, but that didn’t stop the Praise Log shirts from getting into the office literally a day and a half before Troy, Grant, Skid, and I flew out to Seattle (and well after Matthew was already there). We tried a new vendor, and, as I mentioned in Happy Hour #9, Troy returned the proof several times because the colors were just wrong. 

Side note: I’ve learned an important lesson over these last couple of years. There’s a big difference between taking an artist’s work and making a t-shirt out of it later and commissioning an illustration or design specifically for a t-shirt. When you have the luxury of doing the latter, I’ve learned that you want to tell your artist to work only within the Pantone spectrum of colors. If they are allowed to use the full digital landscape of colors (millions), then the printer will inevitably kick the design back to you with a proof that is an approximation of the colors your artist used, and trust me, that approximation is going to be way off. In my admittedly limited experience, this is because most industrial printers have a limited number of colors they can print. That number is probably close to 10,000. Which sounds great, until you realize that any digital artist can pull from millions of shades when using your average design software. If you know a printer that has figured out how to print every shade a computer can digitally produce, hit me up. 

Back to Praise Log. We were biting our nails waiting to see if the shirt would be ready in time for PaizoCon, and thankfully it was—but we had to pay a hefty “rush fee” to make sure the whole order hit NYC in time for us to fold and pack a ton of shirts into our luggage. That rush fee was more than we paid out of pocket for the first 100 OG Navy Blue Glass Cannon shirts we ever sold! Times have changed.

That story ended well, and we want to give this vendor another shot, but to say that we are nervous would be an understatement. Working backwards, the latest the shirts can reasonably arrive and also give us a one-day buffer for something really unexpected, is Monday, July 29. We should allow about two weeks for the full order of a few hundred shirts to be printed and shipped to us. Allow another two weeks prior to that for the back-and-forth to perfect colors, placement, size, and t-shirt fabric/color—along with a physical proof to be mailed to the studio—and we’re a month out. Back that up another two weeks (which is even a little too quick) to hire an illustrator or graphic designer to bring an idea to life, and we land right around a window between June 14 and June 19 when the idea has to be clear enough to send to an illustrator. AND the illustrator has to be already chosen by that time, which is another time-consuming activity. That means that instead of just relaxing after PaizoCon, we'd better settle on a new idea and have it in the vendor and logistics pipeline within two weeks—and we’re at the end of week one. It would be nice if we only needed one of those, but we don’t. We need two. 

At the mid-year point, we add a new Patreon t-shirt design for those that are eligible in July, August, September, and October. If we want that shirt to start going out in July, that means we have to do the same process you read above, concurrently. Only bump everything back a week or two because we have to allow time for us to fold, pack, and ship a shirt that you will receive in July. So now that means we have to have a new Patreon t-shirt design next week. Now, of course we’ve got ideas that we’re fine-tuning and we’re not exactly starting from scratch, but my point is simply this: merch is the tip of the iceberg, and with all we hope to accomplish at Gen Con—both from a business standpoint and from a standpoint of the Glass Cannon Nation Gen Con experience—the deadlines are coming in hot. 

As much as I would love to continue breaking down project management deadlines and t-shirt printing (and I would), I need to talk about PaizoCon before I get out of here.

Last weekend we flew out to Seattle for PaizoCon and our live show at Neumos in downtown Seattle. PaizoCon was a blast, and Glass Cannon HQ did not disappoint. It doubled in size from last year and there were times I couldn’t even find an open table on which to try out one of the 75 or so board games that were in our Games Library. The Naish came out in force and not only ran Pathfinder and Starfinder scenarios, but also were generous enough to leave their board games for the weekend and let folks try them out for free. Thanks to everyone that volunteered to monitor the room, donated games to the library, GM-ed games, or just hung out and talked to us about life in Glass Cannon land. I could never name all of the people I hung out with, but shout-outs to Jake, Stephen, Ian, Ross, Simone, Tim, Kari, Kaitlin, John, Keivan, JC, Eric, Jordan, Shell, Anwar, AJ, Justin, and so many more that I’m forgetting. Thanks for making our PaizoCon incredible.

The icing on the cake was Glass Cannon Live! at Neumos. It ended up being one of our favorite venues for the quality and attentiveness of the staff and for the sound. It sounded incredible in there. As I went over the show settlement with the production manager backstage after the show, I saw that, once again, you get what you pay for. The expenses for the venue were high. Higher than some of the others we’ve played—including Lincoln Hall in Chicago and the Bell House in Brooklyn, both of which are larger venues. Neumos has clearly put a lot of time and money into their sound system and as an artist, you pay for that quality. So our margins were slightly lower than I would have hoped for a sold-out show, but then again, it is a small room at only 170 tickets. The show was unquestionably a success. Setting the annoying business stuff aside, the afterparty on the balcony was one of the highlights of my weekend. I seemed to be floating, as I just met one awesome person after another, on and on. That crowd was so kind, complimentary, generous, genuine, and welcoming that I left with a wonderful feeling and a hope that the world is going to really turn things around and be a better, more humane place. A guy can dream.

Personally, I couldn’t help but feel an extreme sense of the primacy of place, as I stood just offstage, ready to run out and start the show and saw, pictured to my left, three of my favorite bands from my early days in New York City: Muse, Rilo Kiley, and the Flaming Lips. I snapped a quick picture (above), and thought of Dax. Many people don’t know this because there hasn’t been much reason to discuss them on air during Androids & Aliens, but I keep a list of the song lyric tattoos that Dax gets when he has a chance. The lyrics are all just based on real songs that I love that I believe tell pieces of Dax’s story, a story that, as an android, he can only process in pieces himself. Long before our trip to a Neumos, all three of those bands were featured on Dax’s right arm; lines from Rilo Kiley’s “It’s a Hit," Muse’s “Apocalypse Please,” and from the Flaming Lips’ “The W.A.N.D.” (“Time after time those fanatical minds try to rule all the world...we got the power now, motherf*ckers, it’s where it belongs…”). I was never more into music than I was when these three indie bands where in their prime and so they hold a special place for me. Seeing that they stood on the same stage where I was about to perform, I had a fleeting moment of connection, and then I walked out into the lights. 

All in all, it was a packed two weeks that was special and personal—and dry and logistical. It had a bit of everything, just as every week seems to these days. Thanks for a great time in Seattle and I hope everyone kicks off their June with awesome summer plans. 

Until next time…

-Joe