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...
It has been a year an a half living in Osaka, crazy how time flies. I remember releasing the Plastic Fulvia just before leaving Toronto, a product that I could argue changed the trajectory of everything. At that moment, Luftverk grew exponentially, with the support of retailers around the world. At that moment, I developed so many behind the scenes processes for management that it became much more of a corporate job then a creative one. Huge projects like Cheatcode, and the CLYW collaboration definitely had its creative sides dont get me wrong, but the addition of moving to a foreign city, learning a new language, pursuing motorsports and delegating tasks behind the scenes with razor sharp margins meant for a lot of it I was on the brink of burnout. I questioned if I even still liked doing yoyo stuff at all, or if it was just to keep food on the table.
Crazy to think it has been 2 years since the original release of the Plastic Fulvia and Plastic 000. Both models as of now are pretty much sold out everywhere, and I knew it was about time to update both with a small batch of new colors as well as fix a few small issues with the first designs. I appreciate everyone who has reached out anticipating a restock of these - as the manufacturing process is very timely for sure so restocks can't happen as quick as I'd like.
In January, I released the AKURA MG, a yoyo made from Magnesium. This material has a very low density and I talked about how it performs more like a plastic than anything else. But what made that yoyo really special is the aesthetic. I loved the lines on that yoyo. The proportions with the chunky rims were just perfect. One of the biggest aesthetic challenges though were that after the ceramic coating the lines were quite subtle which hid the design.
Jeffrey Pang
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