Blog # 216 I talked about Back to China with two goals.  In this blog I want to talk about Boxes and gel pads get figured out.

We found a box factory that would work with us. In this factory we could send designs to them, and they would make the boxes with our designs and ship to the factories.

The owners gave us a tour of the factory. They took us through the whole process much like the other factory. The designs were uploaded to the computer and sent from there to the machine that dyes the boxes. Then the cardboard would go through the flame process like the other place and finally at the cutting area. This guy that was showing us the cutting machine was missing the top part of his fingers at the joint. I couldn’t help but wonder if he misjudged the speed of the blade going down and what that day was like.

We also had to choose what thickness of box we wanted. I wanted it to be a good quality box but the thicker the box the more it cost. I tested the thickest box and was able to stand on it without it breaking. But that box was $1 each. We went with one step down which was also a great quality box. They would also make the tissue for us with our logo as well.

When I was back in Vegas, I spoke with John our lead designer for User experience, and he said he’d help me with the designs. We decided to tackle the Fitzwell box first so when I got back after this trip, we’d start on design work.

Next was to check out the gel factory that was going to make up the gel pods for our Fitzwell line. We decided to use the generic pods they offered to cut cost plus I liked the look of them anyways.

There would be different sizes made for the type of shoe and of course different sizes by size as well. They showed us different versions of our logo and we finalized all the sizes and logo designs while we were there. For our next trip in April we would see the first run come off the line on the shoes. This was so exciting.