Tag: Despair.com
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Origin Story – 18
There’s chipboard and there’s corrugate. Corrugate is fluted and multi-layered. Chipboard is single-ply and dense – what’s used on a toothbase carton or cereal box. We would insert a corrugate pad into the calendar prior to shrink wrapping it. This would give the calendar the backbone it needed to keep its shape when the shrink…
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Origin Story – 16
In the early days, we had a mix of client-supplied, branded shipping containers and stock shipping containers. Austin Foam Plastics – AFP – produced our branded, custom-sized boxes for Despair. We had the calendar mailer (a wrap), the mug box, the master shipper (fit calendars + non-poster/non-calendars), and the litho-combo (a long rectangular prism that…
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Origin Story – 10
St. Ignatius of Loyola had his daily examen for the Jesuits. If I were establishing a practice for Amplifier, it might be four questions: What do we do? What do we not do? What should we no longer do? What ought we start doing? The answers to these questions have changed a lot over the years at Amplifier. From the start we…
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Origin Story – 7
Ok – back to systems. M.O.M. was necessary but not sufficient. We also needed HarveySoft – a multi-carrier shipping software. After M.O.M. hooked up with Harvey[Soft], we were in a position to keep track of inventory, process orders, and print shipping labels – a generative software relationship. With Harvey we could ship via USPS, UPS and FedEx through the…
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Origin Story – 5
So we were wrapping up our first peak season – we called it Christmas season at the time because we weren’t yet pros – I think it was the evening of 12/23/01. Despair, Inc’s 2002 calendar was the main product for that season, and we were receiving a delivery of the second or third printing of…
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Origin Story – 2
We were using Mail Order Manager (M.O.M.) as our OMS and WMS. M.O.M. was something like $100 off the shelf at CompUSA, as I recall. “Mail Order” Manager because at this point, direct to consumer fulfillment was primarily mail-order catalog fulfillment. Despair’s e-commerce platform was Yahoo Store, and it was cutting edge. Yahoo Store had…
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Origin Story – 1
Most people don’t know what a degree in Classics is. Those that do often presume that it equips you mainly to teach Greek and/or Latin. Unfortunately, I was not a great student of Greek or Latin and had no business teaching either. And you know the saying, “those that can’t teach, do logistics.” We started Amplifier (doing business…
Analogistical 