We thought we had a record day at Springfield this week, but it turns out we were $75 short of that goal. (We went through 8 1/2 oils this week.) What’s amazing is that this amount of sales matches what we made ON THE BEST DAY at the Brimfield Antique Festival. This was a spot where we had to pay more than $300 per day to set up there, and we now sell the same amount on a daily basis in Springfield for $15.

If you’ve been reading his blog, you would have seen that I made some t-shirts about a year ago. They just had the Velma’s logo on the front and this website address on the back. I think I sold about 3 of ‘em and gave away the rest. I just sold all the silk screening supplies to someone on craigslist.org. I found a new t-shirt method and another idea I want to try.

First off, the silk screening method works great if you want to print on many things with few colors for the cheapest price. It doesn’t print details and subtle colors very well and it’s a major pain in the ass to clean up after you’ve done a run of shirts. There are other methods of printing on a shirt.

Heat press transfers and dye sublimation seem to be the way to go if you want to print a photo or colorful design on a shirt on a short production. Once you have the stuff to do this, you can bang out single shirts and change the design as you go along, or even try different designs each time.

I had originally wanted to do a goofy cartoon design for my first T-shirt, but never decided on what a cartoon Velma should look like. I was an art student back in high school and always loved MAD magazine and the style of those drawings. (I especially loved Basil Wolverton.) I also remember seeing these trading cards called Odd Rods, drawn by the artist BK Taylor. Odd Rods are these oversized, grotesque monsters driving automobiles. The cards and T-shirts of the same designs were kinda popular back in the 70’s. Since everyone is calling our product “kettle crack”, I want to do a design of an actual kettle crack addict eating the stuff while having the words KETTLE CRACK right on there, and maybe toss our name and website on there too.

I like the idea of having it in the style of the original Odd Rods style. Then I thought it would be really cool if I could get BK Taylor to do the drawing. I found his agent online and shot out an email to her to see how much it would cost to commission BK Taylor to do it, figuring it would be too expensive to get the ORIGINAL guy to do this. She said that $750 will get me an electronic file of the final drawing. Apparently BK Taylor keeps the original drawing; I won’t own the copyright.

I dunno. $750 is kinda steep to shell out for an uncertain idea of mine. I still need to buy the heat press and printer to actually make the T-shirts, and I’ll only be making $7 - $8 per shirt. I need to move 90 shirts before I even start making a profit? Hoo boy…I dunno. I may take a crack at doing the design myself and see what’s left of my high school drawing skills.

Not too much to report, just that it’s been hot and sales have been steady.  We’re selling near record amounts of bags in Springfield constantly, so I hardly have time to sit down and have lunch.  This goes on for 6 hours straight.  At this point we physically can’t pop much more unless we get a third person to help.  I’m gonna start looking into making a motorized kettle cover which can stir the stuff while I bag.  I guess we’re now the victims of our success.  The days are starting to feel like a grind.  I barely have time to shoot any silly video.

I seem to be turning into the Internet kettle corn answer man.  Because we have such high rankings on Google, everyone finds us first.  A bunch of people who’ve started their own kettle corn biz have been asking me all sorts of questions on how to do it.  One guy in California got access to a large event of 23,000 people.  Apparently he buys a kettle from North Bend Originals and asks me how much supplies he would need to make 25,000 bags of kettle corn.  I tell him that 100 bags an hour is a full throttle, flat out amount of kettle corn that is almost humanly possible to make.  I also tell him that after 8 hours of this, you’d want to put a bullet in your head.

I then get an email from him saying that he NOW got the specifics of the event and he probably won’t be doing it. They want $400 per day AND 25% of the net.  (I was wondering if they at least paid for the anal lubricant.)  I explained the math to him and he agreed that it wasn’t worth doing it.  A typical farmers market only wants $15 out of you.  I’ve recently gotten offers from some “big” events in my area and I just laugh when I see the entry fees.