Whew — I perked up and promised a lot at the beginning of springtime on this blog! Springtime brought a lot with it, and I lost track of keeping this blog more up-to-date. It happens. 🙂
“No apologies or explanations. I hate them.” — Aaron Burr
The Summer Solstice, our longest day of the year, is a perfect time, to take a deep breath, and begin (even when it means beginning again).
Some Badass Backpack updates since my last post:
Backpacks For Dinner (BFD): We have kept our weekly momentum and we’ve had some neat opportunities to stretch. Largely, we’re still focused on the same 3 critical paths that I’ve mentioned in the past. 1) Bags. We’re working on our next bags! That’s wonderful and fun, but also important to mention that we’ve only just recently wrapped up getting “the First 100” bags (first short run for “Sincerity Inside”) completed! More on that below. (2) Website. As silly as this might sound: we’ve only recently modified our robots.txt file allowing our website to be picked up by the major search engines. Why wait so long? Partially intentional? Partially not? “Look deeper” I nudge myself: probably Fear. This has been a long delay on raising our voice because we’re scared. 🙂 That’s okay. Now get over it. (3) Stretching to find (and step into) our identity for this project, Badass Backpacks.
Anne Lamott: “Expectations are resentments waiting to happen.” (HT to Paul Jun post here – this one really helped me Paul — Thank you!).
I mentioned in a recent springtime post that I’ve had some amazing in person meetups and connections this year — that continues to be the case. Thank you to everyone who’s taken the time to meet up with me at a cafe this spring! Not long ago, I had a chance to meet up with some AIESECer friends of mine. I love what Celeste R. Potter said to me about some of my fits and starts as I stuttered to explain Badass Backpacks. “It sounds to me like you need to get more comfortable with moving at a slower pace.” That astute observation makes me smile. So true Celeste! And thank you.
The First 100 (Sincerity Inside Update):
Is my math broken? 25 + 25 + 1 + 20 + 20 + 7 = 98 ← What the hell happened here? As we were pushing through the making process for our First 100 bags, we hit way more speed bumps than we had ever imagined possible. The equation there is showing the batch sizes of our First 100 bags — Bags #1-#100 (minus two bags that were lost as a head nod to probability for short run manufacturing defects — sacrificed for a worthy cause, and just barely at a price we can stomach with a grin. Lessons learned.) As we had started receiving our initial bags in late 2015, readers of this blog already know that we began selling those initial bags right away. I had no idea it was going to take us so long to finish receiving the remaining bags. They came to us in small batches — and we finally have ALL of the remaining bags! This is an exciting moment. Having all of the bags means that we need to get focused on selling the remaining bags… which in a lot of ways — this is where all 3 of our critical paths begin to converge. Time to sell more bags, evolve our website, and raise our voice – yes, all at the same time. Begin. Even if it’s again. Begin.
Happy Summertime everyone! And of course to my Southern Hemisphere loved ones — Happy Wintertime!