Escalante
It’s what happens when this world – the Web world – starts to run into the real world.
The reason I care about all of this is that earlier this year we started selling posters.
We really care about print quality so we wanted to produce the posters ourselves, but that meant doing our own customer fulfilment. What the heck, right, do anything once. See what’s involved.
Man, fulfilment is hard. I suspect had we known quite how hard, we wouldn’t have done it.
Here’s one problem. Big posters require big cardboard tubes. Big cardboard tubes took a big part of our office. Where do you get cardboard tubes? Well, from a cardboard tube manufacturer. The guys we bought make fireworks. These tubes smell like munitions.
What nobody tells you about cardboard is it’s mainly dust and glue. And when you stand in the room with them for a day your lungs get to aching as you inhale that cardboard dust. It’s nasty stuff. Gives you tight lungs.
It turns out that what matters is paying attention to time and motion. If you can shave 30 seconds off customer fulfilment and you’ve doing 500 tubes, you save yourself half a day. So one big mistake we made was putting the packing slip on the inside instead of the outside of the tube. And then we couldn’t decouple packing and shipping.
I am not kidding, I have become obsessed with details like this. Obsessed.