I started humming that John Mayer song "Something's Missing" today. No, don't stop reading, I promise this will be the last John Mayer reference from me (can't speak for Jeff) ever. But back to the point, I was humming it because I feel like we at DressMonkey are slowly but surely checking off our tasks before we can start selling to you all. Corduroy...check. Velvet...check. Boxes...check, etc (hence the title, come on, you must know that song). Something is definitely missing, but I have a good feeling that MMM3 will really teach us what, if anything, is missing from our supply chain or products.

I have established a lot of great contacts that will be extremely helpful in the future on our quest to source everything from buttons to boxes. I really feel like the hard part is almost over, i.e., convincing people that they should give me a smaller quantity. As I have ranted about in earlier posts, the hardest thing for us about starting up in China is the Chinese complete disregard for the little guy, i.e., nobody will sell in increments of less than a thousand...for anything. I'm serious, I really doubt that the Chinese navy cannot order 5 or 6 aircraft carriers, I bet the minimum that the aircraft carrier supplier is willing to go is at least 10 (or maybe the Chinese Navy has a little bit more pull with the suppliers than I seem to) . Well the same is true for buttons. "What? You only want 400? I make 90,000 of these things a day, what the hell am I going to sell you 400 for," is a serious reaction I've gotten on the phone more than once. "You mean you don't want 10,000 of those? Where do you think you are," happened just the other day.

I haven't given up, in fact, here at DressMonkey we're going against the current but we are making slow progress. Our boxes are now ordered, as is about 1/2 of our fabric for MMM3. We'll be up sooner than you know it, and when you purchase a blazer from November to December, you'll know that every single part of that blazer was a small hurdle to overcome here in the world's factory floor, China.