update from Salt Lake City

What a great day. We had a bunch of great experiences. As usual, it will be a couple of months before we can tell if any of this will bear fruit. However, here are a couple of notes...

• We talked to a Chinese bag manufacturer. We want to get a bag custom designed for the ice cream ball. When we first approached the booth both of the reps in the booth came up to talk to us. Both were Chinese and both seemed to be having a terribly difficult time with English. This is not to criticize . . . their English is orders of magnitude better than my Chinese. The interesting part was that one of the reps seemed to be learning English as we talked. By the end of the conversation, she was understanding us just fine and speaking very clearly. We're not sure why she started out "playing dumb" but it was so convincing we almost left rather than try to work through the language barrier. It was a curious opening gambit.
• We met for a while with the founder of peak62.com. Peak62 was just launched in November 2004. The site is expanding fast and seems to be doing very well. Marty, the founder, has a wealth of knowledge about the industry and retailing in particular. He was so attached to a couple of his previous employers, that he kept saying "we" when he referred to them. It was fun and fascinating to get such a data download from someone with far more experience than me.
• Never buy anything from saylors1978. They're sellers on Amazon and, seemingly, many other sites. They listed two balls for sale on the Amazon page where our products are shown but they had a vaguely unpleasant comment attached, "kids tired quickly of this...want to sell it." Steve immediately purchased both balls. Strangely, two days later they refunded his money and claimed to have "listed the wrong product". Less strangely, they've got terrible feedback ratings (1.6 stars out of 5) and other comments from other buyers reflecting the same weird behavior.
• One of our big distributors showed us sales data on our products. The ice cream ball is a hugely successful product for everyone, including this customer. Other than that, sales were basically flat. They asked that we reduce our lot size so that they can hold less inventory. Our rating was 130 and they want us to get up over 200.
  
• One customer suggested that we should "reinvent" the candle lanterns. I think there's some truth to that. At the moment, we aren't spending any money (and not much time) on marketing those products. They need more attention.

And more fun stuff happened, but I'm just too tired to write any more. Night.