As the Meet My Monkey saga continues, we have further fine-tuned our sizing system. I mentioned in some earlier posts that we were going to change our approach, and that has definitely rung true in the past two weeks. Meet My Monkey quickly turned into Beat My Monkey, as only a few of the blazers were worthwhile. We attributed this to our poor sizing system which has completely been shaken up. It all happened while I was out at our factory for a sizing meeting with the PJ-clad factory owner. Instead of Sprite, he offered us a very strange mint cola, which actually might have been Sprite, just aged 10 years. Chinese often mix very expensive bottles of wine with Sprite, to the horror of their foreign guests, and I thought that perhaps this was another level of the Sprite-obsessed country. Somewhere in the world, everything is a delicacy, so perhaps China has found its substitute to Shark Fin (Thanks Yao!).

Whatever the case may be, he took my strange reactions to the beverage as a mild insult, but quickly lost interest as the true point of the meeting was to discuss sizings. I've decided that it is best to be extremely blunt with Chinese people. They like to dance around certain issues, and even more so are very quick to Yes you. So I told the factory owner exactly what I wanted of him for the sizing system, and he basically refused right then and there. I remember myself saying to him, "Well, if you can't provide this for us then I think that will be the end of our business together." He didn't blink and could tell that I was bluffing, I mean, after all, this guy's quality is really spectacular and I can't wait for all of you readers to see what I'm talking about. But, before I turned around and come up with another way out of the impasse, he said he had an idea. He presented me with a compromise that actually could prove to be very beneficial in the long run in terms of erroneous measurements. We discussed this for about an hour, and I left with a big smile on my face, knowing that we had just accomplished a lot. As much as I am shocked by this man's conscious decision to roll out of bed and literally go straight to work, he is proving to be a valuable asset in this process.