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One more week! One more week!
Friday was busy, but much better for me than for the graphic artist working at our client company.
He'd phoned us midweek asking if we could produce three fabric trade show panels with full-color graphics, in time for him to hop on a plane with them Monday. Thin banner material would not do; it had to be fabric -- or nothing, and they would use last year's panels to decorate next week's trade show.
I knew we couldn't do it in-house, and frankly had never heard of a vendor that would guarantee fabric printing that fast... but I dutifully started searching and found someone local that agreed to do it. If I got them the artwork right-freakin'-now.
Although my customer waffled for a couple of hours before green-lighting the cost of my bid, this new vendor still didn't laugh me off the phone, but told me my panels would be ready Friday afternoon. Thursday, there was some prediction of disaster about the finishing stitching + image alignment, until I brought the vendor the customer's panels from last year, which seemed to unruffle their feathers. I think I noticed at one point that there were four panels in the sample package, but didn't flag that to our client's attention. (*cue ominous music here*)
Friday afternoon, I picked up the panels, and they looked gorgeous: cleanly printed, neatly edged, and crisply stitched. On delivery to the customer, their artist helped me lay them out on the floor, and everything lined up, even where design elements were cut in half by the edges between panels. I happened to be watching the artist's face when his boss came out and asked, "Um, where's the fourth panel?"
Turns out, he'd miscounted the panels. We held out brief hope that he'd designed these three to be wide enough to cover the same area as the previous four, but we confirmed by tape measure that all seven panels had the same width, so he was gonna have some dead space on the back wall of his trade show booth.
This was about 4:15 on Friday afternoon. For form's sake, I called my vendor and explained the situation, fully expecting the salesperson on the other end to start searching for the "rubber mallet" button on their phone. To my surprise, they told me they could produce one more fabric panel by Monday at 2:30 -- but by then my client had decided that such an addition would look bolted on to what was already a unified layout, even if the three-panel version was too small.
Maybe they can find a potted plant to cover up the dead space.
In the meanwhile, I'll be printing some incidental posters for them Monday morning (on thin banner material), and bidding on their brochures and business cards for the next time they need a batch of those.
We seem to have made a new customer relatively happy (since we did produce what we were given, very quickly)... and our vendor came off as quite the hero to me; the fabric looked great.
I don't think my client's artist will lose his job, but I've been in *very* similar situations, and almost expected him to have a Patrick Stewart/David Warner moment, clenching his fists and insisting, "There ... are .... three ... panels!"
Everyone ended up happy except him, I think, and his printing project helped me max out my sales week. (I'm on a weird sort of commission structure at my job, but if I meet sales targets for eight weeks in a row, the potential ceiling on my take-home pay gets bumped up. I think this is the fifth week that we've actually pulled it off. Feel free to cross your fingers on my behalf).
He'd phoned us midweek asking if we could produce three fabric trade show panels with full-color graphics, in time for him to hop on a plane with them Monday. Thin banner material would not do; it had to be fabric -- or nothing, and they would use last year's panels to decorate next week's trade show.
I knew we couldn't do it in-house, and frankly had never heard of a vendor that would guarantee fabric printing that fast... but I dutifully started searching and found someone local that agreed to do it. If I got them the artwork right-freakin'-now.
Although my customer waffled for a couple of hours before green-lighting the cost of my bid, this new vendor still didn't laugh me off the phone, but told me my panels would be ready Friday afternoon. Thursday, there was some prediction of disaster about the finishing stitching + image alignment, until I brought the vendor the customer's panels from last year, which seemed to unruffle their feathers. I think I noticed at one point that there were four panels in the sample package, but didn't flag that to our client's attention. (*cue ominous music here*)
Friday afternoon, I picked up the panels, and they looked gorgeous: cleanly printed, neatly edged, and crisply stitched. On delivery to the customer, their artist helped me lay them out on the floor, and everything lined up, even where design elements were cut in half by the edges between panels. I happened to be watching the artist's face when his boss came out and asked, "Um, where's the fourth panel?"
Turns out, he'd miscounted the panels. We held out brief hope that he'd designed these three to be wide enough to cover the same area as the previous four, but we confirmed by tape measure that all seven panels had the same width, so he was gonna have some dead space on the back wall of his trade show booth.
This was about 4:15 on Friday afternoon. For form's sake, I called my vendor and explained the situation, fully expecting the salesperson on the other end to start searching for the "rubber mallet" button on their phone. To my surprise, they told me they could produce one more fabric panel by Monday at 2:30 -- but by then my client had decided that such an addition would look bolted on to what was already a unified layout, even if the three-panel version was too small.
Maybe they can find a potted plant to cover up the dead space.
In the meanwhile, I'll be printing some incidental posters for them Monday morning (on thin banner material), and bidding on their brochures and business cards for the next time they need a batch of those.
We seem to have made a new customer relatively happy (since we did produce what we were given, very quickly)... and our vendor came off as quite the hero to me; the fabric looked great.
I don't think my client's artist will lose his job, but I've been in *very* similar situations, and almost expected him to have a Patrick Stewart/David Warner moment, clenching his fists and insisting, "There ... are .... three ... panels!"
Everyone ended up happy except him, I think, and his printing project helped me max out my sales week. (I'm on a weird sort of commission structure at my job, but if I meet sales targets for eight weeks in a row, the potential ceiling on my take-home pay gets bumped up. I think this is the fifth week that we've actually pulled it off. Feel free to cross your fingers on my behalf).
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