We thought it might be useful to document the process of starting an online business from scratch.
Jim Coudal and Steve Delahoyde will periodically post here about issues involving our
product and business plan. Hopefully things will go well but even if the whole thing goes down in flames,
it’ll probably be interesting to watch.
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One Thing Leads to Another
At Coudal Partners, we do a lot of interesting and satisfying work for a variety of clients and we appreciate the fact that we can control our destiny and put our design, writing and strategic skills to work on projects that are challenging and fun too. That said, we’ve always been interested in exploring ways in which we can have a greater control over the things we create.
This whole Jewelboxing thing got started as a direct result of one of our independent collaborations. We have hosted the series Western State for our friends at Slowtron. The series has become incredibly popular. Episodes have been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times and we’ve been invited to submit the series to a number of film festivals and other competitions. One particular inquiry came from a distribution company in London. They asked for a couple DVDs for their acquisitions department. And, of course, they wanted them in a hurry. We worked all night on formatting the DVD navigation and optimizing it for the European PAL standard and were just about ready to ship when we realized that we hadn’t thought about packaging.
After all the work that went into the shooting and editing and everything else it seemed like printing out some color sheets and putting the disc in a regular old jewel case was not the best way to make a first impression. We’re pretty good at finding things here and over the next couple days we looked at virtually every single disc packaging option available anywhere and decided that they all stunk.
Kevin had saved a promo disc of stock photography he received from Getty, not because we needed another disc full of serious looking businessmen pointing at computer screens or happy people on the phone, but because of the slick, modern hinged case it arrived in. We tracked down another, ripped all the paper out of them and then made our own inserts and sent the Slowtron series winging its way across the Atlantic. I’ll let you know what happens with that.
Anyhow, it didn’t take us too long to realize that there must be other firms and individuals who like us, wanted to put as much thought and effort into what our presentations discs were packed in as we did with the material that we were burned on them.
October 31, 2003 12:00 PM