Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
Andrea abandons Silicon Valley, knockoff kitchen gnomes from Eastern Europe flood the market, and Lester and Perry get their first business plan. Chapter 4 of "Themepunks."
Oct 3, 2005 | Andrea spent the weekend blogging and seeing the beach. The people on the beach seemed to be of another species to the ones she saw walking the streets of Hollywood and Miami and Ft. Lauderdale. They had freakishly perfect bodies, the kind of thing you saw in an anatomical drawing or a comic-book -- so much muscular definition that they were practically cross-hatched. She even tried out the nude beach, intrigued to see these perfect specimens in the altogether, but she chickened out when she realized that she'd need a substantial wax-job before her body hair was brought down to norms for that strip of sand.
She did get an eyeful of several anatomically correct anatomic drawings before taking off again. It made her uncomfortably horny and aware of how long it had been since her last date. That got her thinking of poor Lester, buried underneath all that flesh, and that got her thinking about the life she'd chosen for herself, covering the weird world of tech where the ground never stood still long enough for her to get her balance.
So she retreated to blog in a cafe, posting snippets and impressions from her days with the boys, along with photos. Her readers were all over it, commenting like mad. Half of them thought it was disgusting -- so much suffering and waste in the world and these guys were inventing $10,000 toys out of garbage. The other half wanted to know where to go to buy one for themselves. Halfway through Sunday, her laptop battery finally died, needing a fresh weekly charge, so she retreated again, to the coffin, to wait for Monday and the new day that would dawn for Perry and Lester and Kodacell -- and her.
Tjan turned out to be a lot older than she'd expected. She'd pictured him as about 28, smart and preppie like they all were when they were fresh out of B-school and full of Management Wisdom. Instead, he was about 40, balding, with a little potbelly and thinning hair. He dressed like an English professor, blue-jeans and a checked shirt and a tweedy sports-coat that he'd shucked within seconds of leaving the terminal at Miami airport and stepping into the blast-furnace heat.
They'd all come in Lester's big, crazy car, and squishing back in with Tjan's suitcases was like a geometry trick. She found herself almost on Perry's lap, hugging half a big duffel-bag that seemed to be full of bricks.
"Books," Tjan said. "Just a little personal library. It's a bad habit, moving the physical objects around, but I'm addicted." He had a calm voice that might in fact be a little dull, a prof's monotone.
They brought him to their place, which was three condos with the dividing walls knocked out in a complex that had long rust-streaks down its sides and rickety balconies that had been eaten away by salt air. There was a guardhouse at the front of the complex, but it was shuttered, abandoned, and graffiti tagged.
Tjan stepped out of the car and put his hands on his hips and considered the building. "It could use a coat of paint," he said. Andrea looked closely at him -- he was so deadpan, it was hard to tell what was on his mind. But he slipped her a wink.
"Yeah," Perry said. "It could at that. On the bright side: spacious, cheap and there's a pool. There's a lot of this down here since the housing market crashed. The condo association here dissolved about four years ago, so there's not really anyone who's in charge of all the common spaces and stuff, just a few condo owners and speculators who own the apartments. Suckers, I'm thinking. Our rent has gone down twice this year, just for asking. I'm thinking we could probably get them to pay us to live here and just keep out the bums and stuff."
The living quarters were nearly indistinguishable from the workshop at the junkyard: strewn with cool devices in various stages of disassembly, detritus and art. The plates and dishes and glasses all had IHOP and Cracker Barrel logos on them. "From thrift shops," Lester explained. "Old people steal them when they get their earlybird specials, and then when they die their kids give them to Goodwill. Cheapest way to get a matched set around here."
Tjan circled the three adjoined cracker-box condos like a dog circling his basket. Finally, he picked an unoccupied master bedroom with moldy lace curtains and a motel-art painting of an abstract landscape over the headboard. He set his suitcase down on the faux-chinoise chest of drawers and said, "Right, I'm done. Let's get to work."
They took him to the workshop next and his expression hardly changed as they showed him around their cabinets of wonders. When they were done, he let them walk him to the IHOP and he ordered the most austere thing on the menu, a peanut-butter and jelly sandwich that was technically on the kids' menu -- a kids' menu at a place where the grownups could order a plate of candy!
"So," Perry said. "So, Tjan, come on buddy, give it to me straight -- you hate it? Love it? Can't understand it?"
Tjan set down his sandwich. "You boys are very talented," he said. "They're very good inventions. There are lots of opportunities for synergy within Kodacell: marketing, logistics, even packing materials. There's a little aerogel startup in Oregon that Kodacell is underwriting that you could use for padding when you ship."
Perry and Lester looked at him expectantly. Andrea broke the silence. "Tjan, did you have any artistic or design ideas about the things that these guys are making?"
Tjan took another bite of sandwich and sipped at his milk. "Well, you'll have to come up with a name for them, something that identifies them. Also, I think you should be careful with trademarked objects. Any time you need to bring in an IP lawyer, you're going to run into huge costs and time delays."
They waited again. "That's it?" Perry said. "Nothing about the designs themselves?"
"I'm the business-manager. That's editorial. I'm artistically autistic. Not my job to help you design things. It's my job to sell the things you design."
"Would it matter what it was we were making? Would you feel the same if it was toothbrushes or staplers?"
Tjan smiled. "If you were making staplers I wouldn't be here, because there's no profit in staplers. Too many competitors. Toothbrushes are a possibility, if you were making something really revolutionary. People buy about 1.6 toothbrushes a year, so there's lots of opportunity to come up with an innovative design that sells at a good profit over marginal cost for a couple seasons before it gets cloned or out-innovated. What you people are making has an edge because it's you making it, very bespoke and distinctive. I think it will take some time for the world to emerge an effective competitor to these goods, provided that you can build an initial marketplace mass-interest in them. There aren't enough people out there who know how to combine all the things you've combined here. The system makes it hard to sell anything above the marginal cost of goods, unless you have a really innovative idea, which can't stay innovative for long, so you need continuous invention and re-invention too. You two fellows appear to be doing that. I don't know anything definitive about the esthetic qualities of your gadgets, nor how useful they'll be, but I do understand their distinctiveness, so that's why I'm here."
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