Avlyn's Blog

There are 4 times in the year that we just go crazy at the office. Each time coincides with the release of our new fabric collections for sale. This takes place after the designs are completed and selected. Once the themes are complete, we have to print out our sample cards for each collection. It is a lot of printing, anywhere from 13,000 to 25,000 pages to be correlated into about 200 sample sets that go out to sales reps throughout the world.

Lots of printing, taping and organizing. Our conference room becomes a paper mess and everyone is scrambling to get the samples out.

With this in mind, we welcome any and all help to get this accomplished.

With the risk of being arrested for breaking some child labor law, I want to share an event from yesterday. My 2 daughters have another 10 days of vacation before school starts and they wanted to come to the office, have lunch with daddy and help out. Well, I was all for the lunch with daddy, but was really dreading the disruption they might cause by helping out in the office during this busy time.

But my fears were soon laid to rest, as both my girls were quite good at compiling and taping the sample sets.

I was so thrilled, my girls were really helping out–at only 5 and 8 years old….what great children….what a lucky man I am, maybe I can have them come in during some of their school breaks…what is the legal age for them to really work at the office…all those thoughts came to a screeching halt.

At the end of their 2 hour effort, with me busting with pride,the dream had to end. My eldest daughter Kassandra presented me with a written bill for their services, 30 sample sets X $5 per set for $150 in total. That is $37.50 per hour. Another 30 minutes of negotiating and I was still in big trouble.

Maybe they should stay in school for many many more years!!!! It will save me lots of money!!!

It is always exciting when we get in a new fabric line here at the office, but we are especially excited when there is one that GLOWS IN THE DARK.

Why?? You might ask… I will share an interesting anecdote on what happens here at our office when we are fortunate to receive our glow in the dark shipping samples from the fabric mill.

Glow in the dark fabric ink needs to be charged by either the sun or bright room lights for a few minutes before they will glow in the dark. The room needs to be very dark for you to see the effect. Having offices in Arizona, where I am happy to report— is almost always sunny–and having offices with lots of large windows–does not really offer an environment conducive for viewing glow in the dark ink. What to do……

Well, necessity is the mother of invention and there is one room in the building that does not have lots of natural light—the men’s room.

The ritual is to charge the fabric for a few minutes in the sunlight and we all march into the men’s bathroom, turn off the lights and make sure that the fabric does indeed glow in the dark to our satisfaction. Nothing out of the ordinary—except I am the only man and I am accompanied by 5 or 6 of the women who work here at Avlyn.

You should have seen the look on the UPS driver’s face when he saw all 7 of us exiting the bathroom at the same time! A real Kodak moment!

Thank you to Tricia Swenson of Quilting Bee in Yuma, Arizona!

Trish made most of the quilts seen at Quilt Market in Minneapolis…..and in a record amount of time. Thanks Trish for making our booth look so awesome!

We were sending fabric down to Yuma on almost a daily basis — ten days before QM no less. Trish, like the trooper she is, completed the quilts in a record amount of time; despite the fact that one of the packages got marked “Haz Mat” at some point along the way and was returned from Minneapolis to Yuma, only to have Trish chase the package down, rebox it and throw it back in the UPS truck for redelivery.

We couldn’t have done it without you, Trish!

It was just the perfect flight from Phoenix to Minneapolis. Well, except for the 1 hour line for security screening. Don’t you just love it when they pull a silver haired grandmother off the line for the special TSA attention.

I should have known that the on-time departure, no turbulence and quick baggage was too good to be true. When I checked my mail on my trusty iPhone, I discovered that 2 of our boxes did not make it to Minneapolis. Of course, they contained important samples for market, but the kindly folk at US Customs determined that they wanted to examine the contents. Perhaps the boxes looked a little too much like silver haired grandmothers….perhaps our beautiful batiks samples caught the eye of the custom official–Anyway, some quick thinking at the office saved the day.

Many thanks to everyone at the office for all the hard work preparing for market. Now it is up to us here in Minneapolis to make it all worthwhile.

Tomorrow is setup and schoolhouse. Can’t wait!

Greetings all! I am still new to the whole blogging arena, so please be gentle. A bunch of Avlyn’s fabric designers have nagged and nagged (just kidding) about starting an Avlyn blog, so here I go.

The whole company is crazy busy right now getting ready for the International Quilt Market in Minneapolis. Seriously crazy…I mean martini’s at 10:30AM crazy. Lots of shouting and screaming at the office, but this is really normal for any design driven company with a deadline. Believe me, I can tell lots of stories from my days working at Polo Ralph Lauren, that makes the craziness at Avlyn look relatively mild.

I am really excited about this market. In addition to the new fabric collections we will be introducing, Avlyn will be expanding into whole new product categories. More details to follow.

Oh, by the way–one of the schoolhouses that our designer Karen Combs will be giving at market is about the very topic of using social media like facebook ,twitter and blogging.

Wouldn’t it have been funny if Avlyn did not follow the very core of her presentation…