The skull logo seen at 0:42 is designed by his friend, Huck. Ken Block had seen a similar logo at Huck’s site, which can be seen here: http://huckgee.com/.

I guess he makes a pretty nice living as an artist/designer. They were just going to license the skull logo to Block, but QuickSilver wanted to buy the logo out completely (and they did, for a nice sum).

Huck also designs for kidrobot.com, which sells zany stuff, such as a Soviet walrus plush. The artists primarily have urban roots, according to my coworker.

I don’t know how this led to Nigo, and Bathing Ape, but it did. Nigo is some popular designer from Japan, and Bathing Ape is his brand of trendy clothing that people like Kanye West wear. All for ridiculous prices of course. Nigo has teamed up with two others to form the Billionaire Boy’s Club/Ice Cream, where you can buy $80 shirts, and $250 hoodies. Insane.

What was the point of this? I don’t know anymore, sorry. Well I stripped out all the business parts because I didn’t know how much of that I could talk about, but it looks like if you have talent, there’s some fun ways to make some money!

And yet I had a feeling it was successful (as far as small businesses go), mainly because I feel like I’ve seen the site before (or something similar). That and my friend hawking the site on FB for some reason. So then I looked up the owner of the site through DNS tools, and voila, the address of a very nice, large home in Yorba Linda came up, occupied presumably by a woman (if you want your info public, hide it when you sign up for sites, or use an alt. address). It sounded like my hunch was correct.

Anyway, I guess the point of this post is to invoke some confidence in my peers who may be thinking about starting a e-tailer business, one of the easiest types to start it seems like. The hardest part seems to be securing suppliers. I wonder where she gets her stuff. But the website and cart, those are all easy to build these days. And she proves you don’t need a enterprise level site to pull it off. Order fulfillment from a warehouse can be contracted out, too.

Cursory cost rundown:
Website: Cheap.

Design: Use Joomla or some other framework. Free, and fast to style. Probably as easy as configuring WordPress.

Cart: There are free plugin’s for joomla I think. CC processing can be done by Google or Paypal. Or the commonly used Authorize.net. Yahoo has a cart, too. Business minded coders could make their own pretty quickly.

Advertising: Google AdWords. This could get pricey, but you control your spending limits.

SEO: This has been made into some kind of voodoo art form. Find a guy, or try your hand. I’m not really sure what the “best practices” are these days, but I think the gist of it consists of fresh content, no duplicated content, keywords, and inbound links. I think hiding keywords in code gets you punished.

Warehouse: Your house to start off. That seems to be the most common until one can transition to a real warehouse.

Fulfillment: Yourself from your house. But there are lots of companies that specialize in fulfillment. Or you can have FedEx come by. From what I recall, FedEx is not unionized, UPS is, hence FedEx is cheaper, when dealing with negotiated rates. And then there’s USPS. Cheap, but the tracking blows.

DSLR (or whatever you got lying around): $500? So you can take your own photos of your products. Pretty sure that’s what this woman did. My old boss did that, too.

A white board and photo lights: No idea. $200?

Great products: That’s a tough one. Selling spoons will probably get you no where.

Suppliers: Better get your charisma on.

Those are the basics to start. The tech-minded person will probably have an advantage. If you’re not tech savvy, find someone who is. Things seem to get more complicated once you try to scale further. Order management software, product management software, accounting software, integration, reporting, personnel, blah blah blah.

Why haven’t I started a business? Because I suck. And I have nothing to sell. Well, I did find a supplier for digital photo frames, but I don’t really have faith in that market. Especially now.

The Sartorialist

So, I’ve been trying to develop a better sense of fashion. Not to dress myself, because as far as I’m concerned, I’m satisfied with my hobo look, and I can’t afford another financial sink. I’d rather put some new shoes on my car than myself anyway (see below and give me your opinion). That, and I’m not particularly photogenic to start with. But at some point, I realized that I have no idea/appreciation of fashion at all, nor do I know how to obtain it.

Why bother? I don’t really know. At the risk of my manhood, I guess I just want to better appreciate the efforts well-dressed people put into dressing themselves (you know, beyond just putting on a shirt with a slogan on it). Hell, they seem to put so much time into it, particularly women. It’s a sphere that most men don’t approach (except for the metros). Besides, I already have a general interest in design (product, architecture), and this is just another piece in the design mosaic.

So I figured I’d approach it like how I approached cars. In high school, I couldn’t distinguish a Mercedes from a Nissan. I simply didn’t care. But after inundating myself with car-related media, I learned. I was always baffled why girls would spend time flipping through magazines that held no more content than images of people wearing clothes. BORING! But I suppose they were really just doing what I was doing with cars, except I had the benefit/curse of living in SoCal, where I didn’t need magazines to see a plethora of car design. And clothing is so much more mutable than car design.

Anyway, I still find flipping through fashion magazines boring as hell (just a bit more than skate/snow/surf magazines, god what a waste of paper), but thanks to the internet, I can take a gander for a few minutes every few weeks, and move on. The Sartorialist is perfect for this. It’s basically a site run by some men (and only men at the moment surprisingly enough) that wander metropolitans, taking photos of interestingly dressed people [Wait I was wrong, there are women, too]. Sartoria is Italian for tailor shop, I think, if you were wondering.

So while I won’t be able to rapid fire ID shit like some of the more capable womenfolk, perhaps I’ll be able to respond beyond just a grunt, and give a somewhat reasoned response. Just the other day I saw a beautiful and very well dressed woman at Rooster Cafe. I’m not capable of describing her outfit. See? I am unedumacated. But she could’ve fit right in at the Sartorialist. I would’ve taken a picture, but that would have been uber creepy. I think she was Chris of Splitend‘s sister. Chris is a very well rounded dude. He knows his haircuts, he designs and codes his own sites, he knows his cars, and how to drive them.

Speaking of shoes for the S…which looks better? They both look great to me. I’ve been fiending for white GC-07′s (AHA, betcha didn’t know what those were!) for a long time, but those gunmetal RZ’s look hot as hell.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/28/fashion/28ROW.html?_r=1&ref=fashion&oref=slogin

Somehow I got from there, to Giorgio Armani’s wiki, but I’m not sure how. That baller.  Oh wait, it was from here: Armani designing villas in Egypt.