Well we haven’t posted anything for way too long now. We’ve been so busy, which is a good thing when you depend on busy to feed the kitty. This week, it’s a subject that needs to be treated carefully because nobody wants to make any accusations but… There are people out there stealing designs. Yes, there are cheaters and liars and thieves out there posing as clients. Acting like they have a great project for a company like ours, or yours, talking to you like they are your friends and turning around and stealing your “Intellectual Property”. What a great term that is. This has happened to us twice now recently. We had a company call and tell us that they had a project and wondered if we’d be interested in designing and manufacturing a prototype display for a retail store… which I’m sure they really wanted. They said that they wanted to take this display to market and take orders for the display and the product together and could we then manufacture between two and four hundred of these displays to send to retail outlets across the country. I’m sure this was all legitimate information. Which is, what anyone that lies will tell you that the best lie is mostly true. We started down that design road together like searchers looking for the thing that is going to make consumers stop their browsing and start buying, or bookmark this page in their browsing memory for when they want to come back and get this product for themselves or the someone on their list of friends.
Just a sample of the kind of work goes into a presentation.
I digress here because I need to explain that this is a lot of what we do here. It is kind of our stock in trade. We develop ideas, we build bridges from the mind to reality, from the printed page to three dimensions or in some cases form a cocktail napkin to a fifty foot sculpture. There are three kinds of companies in our business, one company that builds things, one company that installs things, and another that designs them. We do all three, or any one of the three that happens to call and ask. Marketing companies have vendors that do fulfillment, I love marketing companies they have developed their own language and continue to expand ours. At any rate I wished we fell into that fulfillment definition in the lexicon of advertising and marketing because I feel like that is what we do. We are in the wish fulfillment game. Somebody wishes that they had something and we make it come true for them. Alas, the fulfillment people are the ones who warehouse things and put them in boxes and send them off to clients or customers or consumers wherever you are on that list of end users, they don’t actually fulfill anything but orders.
Just a sketch
Back to the body of the story. So, where were we? Okay, the company in question was marketing a designer and his wares and they wanted to display his picture and the product and a video loop all in one easy to put together display that cost less than a thousand dollars a piece to produce. Okay, then, off we go on the yellow brick road of design adventure. This process sometimes takes longer than others and this time it took about a half dozen phone meetings, presentations of designs and revisions, emails, sketch after sketch tweaking this design into the perfect shape and size and all along they were very happy with the design and could we quote the prototype and quote the manufacturing of the display itself when the orders came in and several versions of both of those until it all fit within their budget and was approved by their superiors. All in all about a weeks worth of work. Then… nothing. Waited for a week, sent an email, this all had to be done by market week which was approaching fast, and still no order. Then another email and this is what really kills me, nothing but an email back, “We’ve decided to go in another direction”. There was no offer to compensate us for the time spent, nothing. Now, I’m familiar with clients that are unhappy, I’m sure everyone is because they could be unhappy with anything at a moments’ notice. This was not an unhappy client this was one that was off the hook. This one wanted to disconnect. Wanted, I think, to take our design sketches, our bids and all of the expertise and engineering that went into this and shop it around to manufacturers to get a better bid. We have no real copyright on these designs, they get done in a week. It is the design that gets the job, that is what these people were buying or in this case what I think… are stealing. Has this ever happened to you? It’s not as uncommon as I once thought it was.
Then with only two hours left on the permit which expires at eleven o’clock we’re walking this truck around the corner of 42nd Street and Seventh Avenune and moving it into position right on Times Square at the base of the ticker where the ball comes down every New Year’s eve. I look down the avenue below and this is the shot that I know he wanted all along. It’s what is the true heart of New York City, the center of all that’s truly the city, and a lot of what’s American. The advertising, the people, the traffic, even at 10 AM on a Saturday morning we are attracting a crowd of tourists on the sidewalk. About fifty people have gathered already, taking pictures and watching these guys jump over the photographer’s head while he shoots to catch them mid-air. I took about ten shots or so just to get this one and I saw the Polaroids, it seemed like he never missed. I guess that’s why he’s the photographer and I’m the draftsmen. At eleven o’clock on the dot the cop steps up and stops it. The meter has run out and the permit has expired. So, we’re packing it back up to move the truck over to Fifth Avenue where we have the rest of the day to shoot; but no extra copies of the permit to put in the window of the truck so we get a parking ticket. It’s the life we lead – moving trucks, stacking platforms, explaining to the cop that they were just trying to see if they could shoot in the middle of Fifth Avenue on Saturday, or trying not to break the branches of the trees along the street while we pull a U-Turn to get the truck set up again for another shot. It’s art, that’s what we live for isn’t it, to make art.
