Last few days has been pretty insane. I have been trying to get the packaging and shirts done with a help of a friend, Dwayne. He runs DreamFactory, a print shop located just outside of Toronto. Believe it or not, each shirt is printed by hand in house by Dwayne.
I actually met Dwayne years back when I was building my VTEC Austin Mini. I was looking through Kijiji (Canadian version of Craigslist) for a B18C1 out of an Integra GSR. Of course Dwayne owned one, and after some negotiation I ended up with a rusty car with the motor still in it. I pulled what I needed off the car, parted it, then crushed the shell. The motor is going strong in my car today.
Anyway, 3 years after I got the motor off of him I was looking around for a print shop to do the packaging and shirts for Luftverk. I ran into Dwayne and found out he started up Dreamfactory. Pretty much exactly what I needed.
And that is how I ended up here - 2:30am trying to get shirts made and packaging printed. The packaging is actually ordered in, since it is a larger order. I had ordered the packaging weeks before the release, but unfortunately they had messed it up. The ink on the packaging was slightly cloudy. Fortunately they gave us a full refund and were willing to work it out with us.
Heres the machine that cuts the vinyl for the T-shirts. After each print is cut, the small pieces are separated, and pressed on by a large heating pad, fusing the logo into the fibers of the shirt. Larger batches can be screen printed but since our volume of shirts are so low, it is actually easier and more cost effective to do it this way.
And the first shirt is born. This process is essentially repeated until they are all done. Dreamfactory is actually still really small. A lot of things are done in house, and you'll often find Dwayne at his shop after hours finishing up orders for companies all around Toronto. He only has one other employee helping him out during the day. Which means he can get away with things like parking his Datsun 510 inside the shop.
So for the update - looks like the revised packaging sleeves will be printed by this Friday (July 10th). Shirts will be done by then too for everyone who ordered one. Which means boxing everything up over the weekend and shipping out on Monday. I hate giving exact dates, because things can always get delayed, but it seems pretty solid right now. Hopefully this can give you a good idea of what goes into making all this happen! Now back to work for me...
Its wild to think that the Fulvia design is now 8 years old - originally released in 2016. This design was developed in titanium with the pursuit of rim weight and stability. So much has changed since then. 2024 was an interesting year with the challenges of moving to a new country while maintaining releases. Not many people realize but I often prototype yoyos for myself and they just never get released. Often they join the rotation of throws I have on the shelf, which never make it to production. The monometal 000 and Fulvia was exactly that - prototypes that I submited earlier this year that just never ended up making it to production.
Been a long time since I released much. A lot of things have been going on behind the scenes but a lot of it has to due with either financial or business legal stuff. Both that are not as interesting as I would hope but is definitely necessary going forward. I actually prototyped the initial plastic Stelvia design way earlier on in 2023, but only picked up working on it again at the start of this year.
It has been a while since Ive written much - the second half of 2023 was insanely busy with project management. Since the release of the plastic lineup, I had very little time to focus on the roots of what made Luftverk so exciting. I realized this was a huge problem - I needed to guide Luftverk back to it's roots of exploring new materials and build product lineups that told a story stemmed from exploration. I had done this with plastics last year but in 2024 I would like to also focus back onto some more products that use exotic materials. While being incredibly late to the party this recent project is Luftverk's first Magnesium ever, which was at first canceled and almost never released.
Jeffrey Pang
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