modern times

After yesterday’s little business post about samples, here is one about manufacturing these little precious treasures.

The sample for Le Maroc pour elle is nice, but a pain. It always was. It basically is a thick paper strip, printed, to be folded 5 times, cut twice, and bended and glued once to hold things together. The glass vial is a simple vial without pump mechanism and the bottle label was black print on transparent foil which first is hard to remove and then wouldn’t stick appropriately on the glass. This is going to change now. I have redesigned the whole thing with two goals in mind: Making a closer visual link between the package of Le Maroc pour elle, eau de parfum, and the sample and make it simpler to produce.

I want to be able to mass produce samples like Charlie Chaplin in his modern times, dreaming of an endless flow of samples coming out of a niche factory, scenting the world and providing pleasures and joy. There is, by the way, another movie which mirrors modern life, sixties-seventies style, produced by the French director Tati, called “Mon oncle”. I have seen it when I was a boy with my father and it is gorgeous. There is one scene, where the uncle works in the plastic factory, producing tubes, which at the very end is a picture for how disintegrated modern work can be from the real life.

In that sense, I am disintegrating my sample production into easy to control steps: New vials with pump mechanism (one click and you are done), new red paper labels that are easily put on the vials, a paper cover which needs two folding steps and one glue drop and the vial being glued on the paper. I think it looks even better than before and I have a super-trooper gluing machine that allows me to glow stuff in about 10 seconds. Finally, I will be able to mass-produce samples at a rate of about 1 per 5 min. Think how many samples I might produce until the end of next year…..