I had the chance to visit Europe for the first time this past week with my girlfriend and her family. We flew into the Netherlands and had the chance to experience a wide array of what the country had to offer - taking the first few days to experience Amsterdam and all of the “must sees''. The trip then progressed by visiting the ancient fishing villages of Volendam and Marken and then capping off with 3 days in Utrecht, an incredible university town.
These experiences progressed from “what the tourists do” to “what the locals do” and for me, the latter is definitely more my speed.
It is rich coming from someone that spent the first time in a different continent but all I could think about is outside of the cultural differences, hours of work, the average # of cigarettes smoked per 24 hours, and language - humans are very much the same & the new world of instant gratification knows no bounds.
Whether it was people on the same tour as me in the Van Gogh Museum reaching over the head of our tour guide while she was talking to take “the perfect” picture of a piece of artwork they could do a simple google search for; or the sheer amount of people blatantly disregarding the Anne Frank Museum’s “no photos inside allowed” that we were told before we entered more times than I can count on two hands - to some level it seems we as humans have become so used to being able to have anything we want right in reach of our fingertips that it has become ingrained into our very being.
I was reminded of this fast paced world that we live in during the release of our River Halo performance long sleeve, the first of a series of limited edition products we plan on releasing this summer. We had a small delay from our production team followed by our shirts being mislabeled and having to send them all back to be re-printed - a 10 day delay for a product that already had longer wait times due to it being limited in quantity and capping the inventory amount at 50 items.
In the world of free 1 day shipping through Amazon, who now makes up 38% of all online shopping orders, I understand this is entirely against the way the world works now. When I am online shopping, if what I am ordering doesn’t get to me in the next 48 hours it feels like something is wrong. With that in mind, I want to appreciate every customer who was understanding throughout the process. Being at the mercy of other people’s timelines and potential mishaps doesn’t make business easier by any means.
This year has been a great example of that for me. Besides production mishaps, FedEx lost two large shipments of ours entirely without them ever being found and we had an exciting partnership with a major e-commerce brand crash and burn (no pun intended) after their fulfillment center (along with all of our inventory) was lost in a fire in northern New Jersey earlier this year. Sometimes owning a small business feels like single handedly paddling up the Gallatin River and that's just the reality of it.
There are a lot of learning lessons in each of these experiences though and that certainly won’t stop my persistence in making our initiatives at Oshki work. I want to personally invite each and every one of you to join us for a beach cleanup in Muskegon this saturday and I am also excited for everyone to see what we have been working on for a kickstarter campaign later this fall. Stay tuned!
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