this is the almost finished product. yes, it is a belt buckle with an inner tube as a belt.
now, in theory, i have everything i need to start selling this stuff. and i’ll do so. first of all i want to say sorry for the bad pictures and my bad photographic skills. they are all taken with my smartphone cam. but this blog isn’t about high end photography an beauty and stuff, right? the product photos for the online shop will be made by real pros, i promise. thanks to the never forgetting interwebz i found 3 of this pictures on my webspace. they are from late 2006 and early 2007. this leads me to the next point.
a little bit about the story behind
in 2006 i experimented a lot with wasted material, mostly out of the bicycle universe, because at this time i was extremely fascinated by fixed gear bikes and old racing bicycles. i restaurated a few of them and built a few fixies. i had a lot of parts flying around in my workshop and didn’t want to throw them into the dumpster. i cutted the first buckle out of 2mm sheet metal by hand and wore the belt a few months here and there, until one day there was an accident right in front of the factory building i lived in at that time. the street had an safety island with two traffic singns on it. a way too fast car shaved them off one night. roadmen fixed the problem the next day and i asked them for the 2 bent signs. they gave them to me. i liked the idea of making a new product out of two wasted materials, which both had something in common. traffic, accidents, gridlock. i took the signs to my friend patrick who have all the fancy cnc machines (bengs modellbau) and milled the first buckles. they even didn’t even made it home, because in the evening we had a party with friends and i gived them all away. all of them liked them a lot - well, maybe because they were for free. hahaha. i then bought 8 signs from a bankrupt building contractor for 24 or 26 €. i made 50 new belt buckles out of them and got 50 inner tubes from a bicycle shop in town. this time they made it home. my ex girlfriend brought oodles of people home into our living space at that time, to cut their hair. we had plenty of space in our loft so a bunch of people sat around on all the sofas and chairs. every now and then somebody found them on the window sill eventually and asked for them. this way i sold 25 - 30 pieces, the other ones we gave away for free. i ended up keeping 8 of them and just forgot about it. by the way, there were only the oval edition, the rectangular one is new. and here we are now, i have the other parts of my business up and running and they came into my mind again.
plans for tonight
as i haven’t really got an fixed abode and reside most of the time partly at my parents house and partly on the road (friends couches, hostels etc.), i carry all my possessions with me almost all the time. so i decided to stay at a friends dwelling place in bielefeld until i leave for berlin on tuesday. tonight i’ll try to sell a couple of belts on the streets, right out of my backpack. why should i do that, you ask? my goal is to make a minimum of 100 € within 2 hours at least. this will fund a couple of meals at a restaurant or the first budget for marketing and stuff. furthermore i can learn a lot about my product, test reactions, hear what people think about the belts, collect the first questions for the faq section of the shop, discuss on improvements and see what price i could charge. this is also for fun and to improve my hard selling skills. i’ll start with a price tag of 60 € and will bargain like salesmen at oriental bazars. i’ll keep you up to date tomorrow, if i don’t get caught (like almost every time i make those stunts) by plain-clothes police and end up in jail.
what do you think?
about the design, the market potential, the usability? i am thankfull for constructive criticism - even for improvements of the text. maybe my english is horrible and completely incomprihensible, as i only read a lot and talk to people, but usually never write.
