Adam: Backpacks for Dinner

Longest stretch of quietness I’ve had since launching the blog a couple of months ago.  I’ve been a touch buried in “critical paths” and critical path work.  I love this post by Seth Godin: Understanding critical path

The longest string of dependent, non-compressible tasks is the critical path.
–Seth Godin

Badass Backpacks has several things we’re working to ship, so we have several critical paths all happening at the same time.  Whew… busy.  Bag production, still wrapping up.  Website development, underway.  Establishing our identity, always evolving.  🙂  I’ll keep posting updates here as inch along our critical path to ship.

Seth Godin and the #altMBA

I am so amazingly thankful for all of the ideas and observations that Seth Godin has shared in his work and in his writing.  He has had a profound impact on the way I go about my own work.  Which is why I am over-the-moon-ecstatic to announce that I’ll be participating Seth Godin’s altMBA workshop in the January 2016 session!  The altMBA is an intense one-month workshop created by Seth Godin and his team, directed by Winnie Kao.  I’ll be participating in the altMBA with Badass Backpacks on my mind, and I can’t wait to see what they have in store for the January session.  Given what I’ve learned from Seth’s work already, I can only imagine that there will be plenty of important questions to ask, and plenty of important work to get done.  I’ll give some altMBA shout outs on this blog once it gets underway.  Kick off will be on Jan 11.  While they say over and over that we will be intentionally drinking from a fire hose — I am smiling ear-to-ear with excitement and anticipation.  I think it will be a great thing for the critical path we are walking on and dreaming of creating with Badass Backpacks.  I can’t wait to get started!

I love this photo from earlier this year (2015) when we had received Sincerity Inside’s final prototype from Tucker & Bloom.  Many people that I’ve shared this photo with struggle to find the backpack in the picture.  🙂  It blends in.  It gets lost in the noise.

We should not pretend to be something that we are not.
— Rusty Kocian

This was one of those magical moments during a BFD session where we were struggling with how to sell our first bags.  And as soon as Rusty uttered these words, they not only made it into my notebook — they made it into our business plan.  Part of our mission and part of our mantra: we will not get lost in our ego — we will not fool ourselves into thinking we are something that we are not.  We will not pretend, and we will not fake the funk.  We will not get lost in our own noise.

Badass Backpacks is starting small.  One bag to sell, and so many bags in our dreams that we don’t yet have resources to begin making.  With Thanksgiving all wrapped up, and the final month of the year looming large:  we are shifting our focus for final preparations to begin selling the First 100 of Sincerity Inside… but I am also dreaming big about what 2016 will hold for us.

I cringe a bit as I begin to reconcile the fact that you, my small (but growing) following on this blog will likely wonder why Badass Backpacks is moving so slowly.  Not only in the lead up to finally selling Sincerity Inside – our first bag – but also why so slow on getting these other bags ready to go.

Some quick Badass Backpacks insights:

• We will not pretend.  We dream of being able to produce tons of Badass Backpacks.  But the reality is that we are so new to this, and so raw, that we will stumble quite a bit as we launch into 2016.
• We are intentionally slow.  Our pace is counter-intuitive to the start up culture that Rusty, Eric and I are more familiar with in our tech careers.  While the pace of the 21st century is all about shipping and shipping fast, (perhaps failing, BUT failing fast) — we are strangely finding great joy in embracing our limited speed. While it’s frustrating that we can’t always move more quickly – we find that when we embrace our slow pace: magic happens.  There is beauty in the tension between patience and impatience.
• We are intentionally small.

What if, instead of trying to reach more people, we obsessed about reaching people more?
–Seth Godin

Had a wonderful BFD session tonight.  I met with Eric at Epoch Circa 13.  And we immediately dug in on some important topics.  I’m exhausted because we covered a lot of ground.  This was one of those nights where we needed to challenge ourselves – and so we did.

Eric and I thrashed on questions about our pace, and about improving our storytelling.  Calmly.  And with great patience.  And tons of shared laughter.  But thrashing for sure.  Struggling with our own fears and sticking with the conversation.  I am so grateful to be working with you Eric!  You are an amazing listener.  🙂

Back of the Bag:

The back of the bag is covered with a thick nylon mesh material.  I’ll have to work on getting some better pictures of the back of the bag to highlight the material and texture.  Same goes for the straps.  The straps have a thick ballistics nylon on the outer-upper side and the bottom side is more of the nylon mesh.  All of that surrounds a foam material that is thicker on bags #5-100 than the foam used on bags #1-4.  There is a very slight and almost hidden detail at the bottom of the straps where the adjusters sit.  Once again — this detail deserves far better photography than what I have to work with now.  (I just tried to snap a quick photo sitting at Yahala cafe, but it’s late at night and the lighting isn’t cooperating with me.)  So for now, here’s a few shots of that slight “touch of color detail”… I’ll make sure to come back later and provide some better images.

Parts of the bag:

• The Lid
• One side of the bag
• The other side of the bag
• The FRONT
• The back
• Inside the bag … (details to be posted soon)  🙂

Week of Thanksgiving — a beautiful time to reflect on gratitudes.  And I plan to do that as much as I possibly can this week.  I mentioned in passing towards the beginning of this blog that there are many people that I look forward to thanking.  I hope that this will always be part of the mission and mantra of Badass Backpacks:  to be extremely grateful when we have the chance to learn from and work with amazing people who share a bit of themselves with us and with this project.

We are still in the anxious anticipation phase, waiting for the First 100 to finally arrive so that we can start selling them.  I was really thinking that we would already be selling bags by now.  Alas.  Inevitable on our first production run that there would be countless lessons we could not anticipate we would be learning.  And for that I am grateful.  While mildly frustrating that we can’t start shipping just yet — the extra time that this delay is buying us is going to good use.  I continue to be grateful as well that Eric and Rusty both smile and hang with me, calmly and confidently, as we … wait.  I know that most folks reading this blog are also patiently waiting.  🙂  I am grateful for you too.

Bags are coming soon.  In the meantime – let’s enjoy this week of Thanksgiving!  There is so much to be grateful for!  As for speed and going faster:

You will speed up once you’re comfortable going faster.
-Seth Godin

Nicole Meléndez, the founder of Hábito Design, is the designer that we worked with to create our initial technical design for Sincerity Inside.  Working with Nicole was a really awesome experience – most importantly because of how she embraced me and my team, and because of how she embraced the spirit of Badass Backpacks.  She loved the theme, and although backpacks aren’t really her thing, she listened closely to what we wanted to create.  And then she got to work on several iterations of our first ever designs.  While our final product has drifted quite a bit from those designs she created — the bones of what she crafted are there and we couldn’t have made the final version of Sincerity Inside without her work and her design.

Thank you Nicole!!!  So grateful for the joy you brought along to the work you did with us – we learned a lot!

Eric, Rusty and I have absolutely no prior experience designing backpacks — which means that from the very beginning we knew that we were going to need to find somebody who could help us with our bag design.  Maker’s Row helped match us up with Nicole for a first effort at getting a “TechPack” created for this bag that we wanted to create.  To give you an idea of just how new to all of this we are, I had two questions about the “TechPack”.  Adam:  “First off, what the fuck is a Tech-Pack?  And secondly, is it really called a ‘Tech-Pack’?”  🙂  Long story short, the TechPack is a large spreadsheet with several important parts — all related to each and every piece of the bag, top to bottom, and inside and out.  Materials, measurements, and draft drawings (like this, this, and this) all combining to give the pattern maker the direction they’ll need for drafting the material patterns (for cutting & sewing) in order to make the bag.  Whew, that’ws a mouthful.  And yes — “Tech Pack” seems to not just be an industry term — it’s THE industry term that is widely used in design and manufacturing production.  🙂  Now we know.

As Badass Backpacks continues onward, there is no doubt that we will be creating more tech packs in the future.  The work that Nicole did with us to create our first tech pack was special — it was a neat chance for me to watch a 3rd party conspire with Badass Backpacks — thank you Nicole for showing up and facing the FRONT.  Thank you for putting yourself inside our first ever bag.

The FRONT of the bag:

The front of the bag takes the central focus of Cheryl’s painting, and layers it across the two forward facing pockets of the bag.  That central focus being the silhouette of the person with hand to chin and lips while facing the FRONT.

As a student of Cheryl’s, I feel obligated to smile big and hold back on imposing any kind of definition on what this artwork is supposed to represent.  I have been swimming in the fabric used to make these bags, and I have sat in observation of Cheryl’s original painting for many years.  It resides in my house hanging where I am lucky enough to observe it frequently.  I am sure at this point that the meaning I have begun to derive from this work is very subjective.

Cheryl taught me a lot about the permission we should all grant ourselves to embrace the fact that we can bring ourselves to the table when we are enjoying artwork that someone else has created.  The lesson was precisely that the meaning we might presume or project is influenced heavily by what we are ourselves bringing to the table.  This is what the Badass Backpacks team means when we talk about:  Bring your full self.  Put yourself inside.  Face the front.  What you bring to the conversation can change everything.  And just when you least expect it… (you can’t plan for screen magic), the very thing that you bring with you:    will   make   magic   happen.

It’s a beautiful idea to make front and center:  because it all starts with you, showing up, and facing the FRONT.  “Keep the channel open”… Cheryl shared this beautiful quote by Martha Graham with me – this quote has swirled in my head relentlessly during our BFD sessions focused on creating this bag:

“There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and because there is only one of you in all of time, this expression is unique. And if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium and it will be lost. The world will not have it. It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open. You do not even have to believe in yourself or your work. You have to keep yourself open and aware to the urges that motivate you. Keep the channel open. … No artist is pleased. [There is] no satisfaction whatever at any time. There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching …”

-Martha Graham

Show up.  Face the FRONT.  🙂

Badass Backpacks

We recently upgraded our landing page from BadassBackpacks.com!  As we pass some important milestones in this project and begin preparing to launch our site to start selling our first backpacks — I wanted to provide some quick updates on where we are with bag production. (As well as some quick links for those of you looking to skim for a quick catch up on this project :-))

The First 100

“The First 100” are one-hundred hand-signed bags… they are the first short production run produced by the Badass Backpacks team.  With such a small quantity of bags in production, our first 4 were used as a QA run.  Bag #5 recently got finished up and all those production hiccups on 1-4 are fully ironed out.  And now… production is underway for bags 6 – 100.  These 95 bags will be going on sale Winter 2015 — as soon as I have these bags, we’ll start selling!

Sincerity Inside

You can read more about the “Sincerity Inside” theme, and also more about the artwork and the artist, Cheryl Hicks on this blog.  I’ll be posting more updates here as we get ready to launch Badass Backpacks’ first bag (Dec 2015) for sale on www.badassbackpacks.com.

For several of my newest followers out there — welcome!  I’m so grateful for all of the excitement and encouragement that is beginning to buzz around this project.  We have a busy few weeks ahead!

Parts of the bag:

• The Lid
• One side of the bag
• The other side of the bag
• The FRONT
• The back
• Inside the bag … (details to be posted soon)  🙂

Landing page for BadassBackpacks.com

We’re getting ready to switch over the BadassBackpacks.com landing page… sigh… I’m really going to miss the old landing page.  The old landing page has been up for quite a long time.  It’s changed and evolved… slowly… drip by drip… just sitting there silently with our logo gif rotating through, non-stop for the limited (yet shockingly regular) number of visitors that gave it a visit.  I used to feel like I owed people an apology for the vagueness and lack of information.  (Many of YOU reading this blog have been looking at me sideways begging me for “more information please.”)  As time has passed by, I’ve really come to love that simple landing page.  I’ll miss it.  As any project continues to grow – so grows with it the complexity.  And need to start sharing the story.  No matter what happens next for Badass Backpacks, I know that the heart of this project is a vague and difficult to explain experimental art project that centers around a deeply profound need for balance and our unique human needs for self-expression.  … for me this is beautifullly represented in that old landing page.   (It’s okay for you to laugh at me here.)   And now, it’s time to upgrade.

There’s a bit of an explanation of the old rotating gif version on Our Logo page… AND just in case you hadn’t seen it yet — here’s that gif, just one more time 🙂  It makes smile.

Question: “Who did you work with to get these bags built?”
Answer:  We are working with quite a few amazing people.  Most of them we met via an awesome online community called Maker’s Row.  The two key contributors, Nicole Melendez (Original Tech-Design for the Sincerity Inside bag) and David Bloom (bag prototyping and build) are both examples.  I’ll post more about them soon…

Maker’s Row was more than just a little awesome.  In early 2013, Rusty passed me the link to the Maker’s Row website — we hopped over to the site and immediately something in my gut told me that this was something we were needing to discover.  I had a first conversation with Maker’s Row while they were in the very experimental phase of offering paid services, and it got started with a brief but powerful conversation which later turned into a more prolonged project where Maker’s Row helped us push through the parts of their process that weren’t intuitive to the Badass Backpacks team.  (Design, Pattern Making, Materials, Sample Making, Tooling, and Manufacturing.)  Maker’s Row has been growing up and evolving since I wrapped up my work with them in late 2014.   They’re offering more and their community is growing.   I continue to be impressed with what they are creating.  During all of my work with them:  they met me exactly where I was in the process.  They didn’t waste my time and they helped me move exactly at the pace I was capable of — which is slower than I thought, and faster than I could’ve imagined.  You can check them out on their blog, and you can read more about how they work.  I mentioned recently that I want to start thanking some of the amazing people that have helped us get these bags made… and that begins with a huge Thank You to the Maker’s Row team.

So grateful and happy that I got to work with them, and oh yes, we will certainly be working with them again in the future.  The Badass Backpacks team continues to dream big about the next bags we’ll be creating.  And for everything that we create, we’ll likely need to find people who can help us pull it off — that also will begin with Maker’s Row.  🙂