A slight delay.

Just writing a quick note.  I didn’t have time to meet with my website developer this weekend due to a last moment decision to hit up San Diego for a four day stretch.  I needed the vacation.  It was quite enjoyable except for the brief time I spent in a rip tide at the ocean that just wore me out getting out of it.  Oh well, makes an interesting story and I got out of it just fine.  The rest of the trip was great hanging out at the Gaslight District and I did find an excellent Sushi Bar in Old Town San Diego that I’ll definitely hit up again next time I’m in the area.

As for the website, I was told that most of the coding is now done and tested and all that’s really left to do is wrap up the content for the page and do a few tweaks.  Hopefully this weekend will mark the end to this adventure because our next project is so much more involved and we’ll need to get moving on it to make our launch date deadline of November. 

It’s going to be crazy for us in the coming months.  Should be interesting. 

 

 

 

 

We’re officially official.

Just making time for a quick note to you guys.  We’ve got the word today that our LLC went through making us official business owners.  MOYA Enterprises is officially green lighted.  Our business account with Chase bank has been approved but we’ll need to cross our “t’s” and dot our “i’s” there this week.   Then we’ll begin to tie everthing together to the company.  This includes getting everything together for the web-hosting of the new website that will have to be tied to MOYA enterprises.

Another thing worth reporting is we’re bringing in the talented artist Ben Miller to do some crazy designs for us and really add some quality designs to our collection.  Ben is a graphic artist in the video game industry.  He currently does background art for the game series Guild Wars I believe.  I’m not sure entirely because we were just put in touch with the guy through a mutual acquaintance.  I do know that Ben is very talented and will bring a lot to MOYA tees.  More later….

Steve

Is having a disease named after you a honor?

Well okay, the disease wasn’t named after us at all.  It’s just that today in the long tedious hours between when I’m free to work on MOYA (and the interruption I am referring to is of course my day job), my good friend and fellow business owner Ethan sent me a wikipedia link to the moyamoya disease.  It sucks that this disease causes strokes no matter how rare it is.   

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moyamoya_disease

My eyes are on the prize.

I haven’t made time to add a post to the blog so I guess I’ll remedy that.  We’re still doing the new website.  We actually have the look of the site down and the features worked out.  Right now we’ve begun the coding process.  I have generally knowledge of HTML but when you get into more advanced coding such as flash or DHTML then I am lost.  Basically I’m having the website done so that I can easily maintain and update the site with no trouble.  I do plan on becoming much more versatile with online web development than I currently am, but we’ll keep it simple yet dynamic for now.  “Keep it simple, stupid, is our current motto for MOYA. 

As for the web hosting, I’ve decided to go with hostmonster. com.  From what I’ve researched about them, I think I’ll be happy with their service.  I’m not that knowlegable about hosting companies, but from what I do know they sound legit.  They offer unlimited bandwith and advertise 99.9% uptime which pretty much means the MOYA website will rarely, if that, be down which is a definate plus in my book.  They are very affordable and there is no contracts so if I don’t like them then I’m not stuck with them or have to pay anything to break any contract.  If anyone knows anything bad about that company then please speak up, but so far I’ve seen nothing negative in the consumer reports I’ve reviewed.

We have other projects that will seriously rock for us if we can pull them off, and I see no reason why we can not, but right now my main focus is on getting the moyatees.com website up and rolling.  The new site will set the look for all MOYA shops and affiliate sites.  After that, I’ll spend more time on our other projects and some other things I’ve got cooked up.   There’s quite a bit more going on right now, but I’ll go more into that later.

The transition continues on.

We still don’t have the new website up, but we’re one step closer.  We finished our first official photo shoot for MOYA and it went well enough.  We got some great shots in there.  Some crappy shots as well, but that’s how it goes.  I’ll try and get some shots revised and posted here soon for you.  We have three model shots done and three more left to do before we branch out and find more models to work with.  We already have volunteers ready to go but we want to finish what we have before ordering new products for future shoots.  Honestly though, I’m loving the fact that people are starting to want to get involved with our little T-shirt company and I’m excited about what’s next for MOYA.

Besides the great group of people that have been working the sidelines for us, we just recently was approached by a graphic designer that does some background art for gaming company responsible for the MMORPG Guild Wars.  He’s offering to do some graphics for us.  The final details have not been hammered out and I have not officially corresponded with the guy yet.  I live in Phoenix and he lives in Washington State.   We heard of the guy’s interest to work with us through a friend (our photographer Jen).  If it all goes through though, we’ll be able to do a lot more with our designs then we previously could and that’s definetly something we’ll be looking into.

MOYA- Super size this….And then some.

We’re going to be doing a model shoot this Saturday and things are really starting to come together for that.  Right now we have 4 definitely models that will be doing the shoot for us with two more that have yet given us a yes/no answer.  Either way, we will have a lot to work with which is all good by us.

We brought some good friends aboard to offer their expertise to the shoot.  The funny thing is that these people will also double as models.  That’s how we roll with MOYA.  We got a photographer and my roommate Jeremy has a world of industry experience that he has offered (Check his work out at www.jeremydoty.com to learn more about him).   Basically he will be acting as a marketing/design/photoshop consultant to help us get some effective shots to work with and manipulate to feature new designs down the road.  With the technical backgrounds and industry experience on board for this project, it’s almost easy to forget that MOYA was started by a couple of amateurs that didn’t know how to get a t-shirt business off the ground. 

Besides the photo-shoot, we are in the process of building a new website for MOYA.  We have a few websites and online stores about MOYA (counting this blog) on the web now but really no affective way to bring it all together and really give everyone a good perspective on what we offer.  Yeah we know we’re primary a t-shirt shop and that’s fairly cut and dry, but we’re involved with different printers and distributors and different products are offered at different places within our organization.  We want to reel in our options for all of you if that makes any sense.  Plus, I’ll be honest, we want to “wagon-wheel” our operation a bit so that we create a single platform to advertise all of our operations as a whole instead of running separate campaigns to drive traffic to our Cafepress Business, our Zazzle business, and our other involvements beyond that.  Call it being protectively lazy; just kidding.   The website is currently being designed by a Naval Officer named Joshua Ross who will also be doubling as a model for the shoot.  Multi-taskers unite!

So that is what’s on our plate so far.  We should have everything going within the next couple of weeks and I’ll post our progress here if you’re interested. 

Hopefully this is an April Fools joke….Please.

Just got an email saying that Cafepress is starting an online dating service.  I just don’t get the logic in moving in that direction at all.  What I find hilarious is they just launched it and they have a slew of testimonials saying how well it works.  So there you have it people…if you’re looking for that one significant other and you only have five seconds to accomplish that feat, apparently Cafepress can deliver under those circumstances.  Okay, from this point on I refuse to plug this service any longer.  I promise. 

MOYA- Now with Kung Fu Grip.

Last Friday at 10 am, my partner in crime Ethan and I had a scheduled phone meeting with a Mr. Rob Greenleaf from zazzle.com.  Now anyone who has ever tried to do something with cafepress or a cafepress-like organization (online t-shirt sales) knows what it’s like to deal with a customer service operation that these companies put out.  In fact, I guess this spreads to really most email-based customer service operations.  I’m referring to the “copy and paste” answers you get where you have to pick the response apart to see if your question was even answered.  At least this is my experience so far with such. 

Talking with employee number 69 Rob Greenleaf at zazzle.com (yeah I’m serious) was a new and refreshing change of pace for us.  He  

It was interesting how this meeting came to be for us.  We’ll admit we sorta kinda “completely” violating one of zazzle’s shop owner agreements by using some model shots where we shouldn’t have.  I know, shame on us.  We were not trying to be shady or anything.  But actually it wasn’t the actual use of the model shots that were the issue at all.  We can use the shots all we want actually.  The only hang up was we also used the shots to drive some traffic to our cafepress site as well.  We understand this issue and we are now well aware of how competitive with Cafepress (or how they call it CP) Zazzle is.  We support this competitive nature of zazzle because it means some exciting new stuff will come out in the near future and MOYA is going to be all the better for it.  (Can’t reveal anything till after the launch however.)

Since MOYA still plans to heavily promote both zazzle and cafepress (CP) we have taken all model shots down and have decided to go with our original intent which is using our own models.  No date has been set for the shoot right now, but if all goes well we should be ready to within the next couple of weeks.   We’ve got a photographer and models lined up as well as a few others that will be on shoot.  Should be fun.

Back to our conversation with Mr. Greenleaf. 
Rob agreed to be our contact man and answer our slew of questions.  No
 copy and paste answers either.  We got the 411 on how Zazzle works
 internally as well as their company goals and focuses and all that fun
 stuff.   Bottom line is MOYA now has a contact within zazzle and our sales
 should increase because of it.  Exciting stuff.
Off topic, but related, we got a call this morning from Spreadshirt
 and I have to give them props for doing so.  The breakdown is we ordered
 a shirt with an image of a tribal rose that takes up the back of the
 shirt.  They called us to make sure we didn’t want the design on the
 front.  That’s some pretty solid customer service.
(We’ll post our model shots as soon as we have them ready.)

The down-side of living in a post Benjamin Franklin world.

I had some plans to redo this blog page and get some shirt designing done this weekend.  Alas, my landlord/roommate/old time friend chose this weekend  to completely redo the lighting in the kitchen.  Since my roomate is what we like to call a self taught do-it-yourselfer, which there is nothing wrong with that, I didn’t get to do much this weekend because the power was turned off.   

I did roll over to my business partners place which is about a 45 minute drive and we did a side project design.  We’re planning a model shoot and we had a few concepts we wanted to develop and get an order purchased.  We want some products from spreadshirt and zazzle.com to test their design capacity as well as guage how fast products are recieved.  While I’m fairly confident that Zazzle will deliver a quality product, spreadshirt is a different story.  Hopefully it will pan out.  If not, we’re planning on finding out now.

Update 03/17/2008

My access to my myspace page has finally been restricted from work today.  Corporate America strikes again.   To avoid allowing my days to feel that much longer during for work, I thought I’d write another blog.  The topic is the spreadshirt store we’re trying to open.   The site has it’s pros and cons.  I absolutley love the design space the site allows me to work with.  I don’t like the limitation with how many colors I may use while keeping the designs durable for long time enjoyment.  (By which I mean the design staying fresh over continuous washes.)  But it makes sense to me, I guess, why they limit the color use.  Printing on a larger  surface does require considerably more ink.  Limitation is far more econimical so I’ll hold my rant because it makes sense.   I still have a lot of design freedom and I could always introduce more pictograms.  All is not lost.  Here’s another tool/hangup with spreadshirt that I certainly will not utilize.  They have a whole collection of clipart that you can throw onto a shirt to enhance or to partake as the design.  I’m sure that is fine and well for some people, but I don’t feel the need to cut corners like that.  Sure we’ve manipulated images to create the design we’re looking for.  We even have a couple shirts with recognizable images as  a pulp culture reference.  Clipart just feels silly to me for what I am trying to acomplish with this t-shirt company we started months ago.  But for those who have nothing but Microsoft paint to design shirt with than by all means knock yourself out.  There is a few other problems with spreadshirt that I am working through.  I’m hoping, however, that most of it is from a lack of understandment of the program then the complete lack of features I’m used to and therefore rely on.  Hopefully I’ll get a foot-hold in this spreadshirt.com soon.  My final opinion= Great potential, just not as high as I had hoped initially.  Still I feel it’s a huge step in the right direction and I hope I feel the same in the months to come.  If anyone knows of any other online t-shirt websites with the option of opening a store, let us know.  We’ll take a look at it and see if it meets our goals.  Who knows, maybe we’ll throw you a free shirt for the heads up.