Blog # 226 I talked about my strength slowly comes back. In this blog I want to talk about First Zappos Tour group arrives.

So, a few months back Richard had this idea to have people from Zappos merchandising to tour the factories to see how shoes are made. We also included people from other areas that might benefit as well. We had a jam-packed itinerary for everyone, just like our first time to China.  We would take them to factories, tanneries and other places of interest.

The first stop was a tannery. I had not been to this one before so I didn’t know what to expect aside from whatever I’ve seen already at other tanneries we toured. We met the owners at the facility and they were great at taking the team to each station and explaining each process for each machine.

First stop was the dye and paint stations. There were some skins that were painted but most of them were dyed in the big drums. Both processes were equally interesting. Then we went by where they hang them to dry and then trimmed.

In the previous tanneries I toured, they would bring the wet blues in from a different facility. That process wasn’t a pleasant smell. This tannery did everything here. The skins would arrive in containers and then they would chemically treat them with a chrome salt mixture to make the wet blues. They were unloading new arrivals this fateful day. Let me try to explain what we experienced.

In the bay area we had a few homes that had rat problems. You could see the rats running across the telephone poles. It was very important to make sure you sealed your homes so they couldn’t get into the attic. We would trim all the trees and bushes to keep away from the house. One day we noticed some noise in our attic, so we called an exterminator. He saw droppings so he set some traps.one day there was a very unpleasant smell. It was a dead rat. I’ll never forget the smell of a rotting animal.

This smell we were experiencing was like 100 dead rats. It was so bad it made your eyes water. Everyone had the same disgusted look on their face. It was kind of comical but still brutal to say the least.

After a long day everyone was wiped out. I’d say everyone was asleep on the bus ride home. We decided to just have a dinner in the hotel this evening because we had a full day starting in the morning. We would go to more factories including the ones that were making our shoes and Paul’s new factory being built. One of the factories was hosting a big dinner in the evening and invited us to join in the fun.