When we first started the blog, we thought we were going to be able to post a lot more. That, obviously was a challenge we haven't been living up to. I've been busy, really busy. Couple that with the fact that I have to rely on Jeff to post this because our friends in the Chinese censorship bureau deem someone's site on our server "not promoting a harmonious society," and well you have a recipe for un-attentiveness. That's going to change though, look in the coming months leading up to our launch with a few more posts a week than the current average (which shouldn't be too hard to beat).

While Jeff is busy in the US designing and executing a sales and marketing plan, an update on what I've been up to over here on the other side of the Pacific:

Website: After almost a month and a half of functional specification writing (fancy speak for "telling the programmer what we want"), I finally finished our initial work on the website and now our programmer is building it. Before DressMonkey became my full-time job, I left my last job being on the programming side of applications, I swore that I wouldn't commit the cardinal sins that our clients committed on us, adding more features during the build phase. I have since violated my own creed by occasionally adding more "nice to have" features to the site and that has slowed the build phase down a little bit. Thus, our site is going to be online in May, not April as we had originally hoped for. I have high hopes for the site, as a lot of work went into making it overly user-friendly and also maintaining our graphic design edge that we have in the blog. We have our ever-hard working graphic designer, Tess z German to thank for that and I'll make sure we publicize her a bit more in the future.

Our Blazers: Following our trial run, Meet My Monkey 3 from November to December, where we actively took orders, we were presented with some positives and negative outcomes. On the positive, people liked our products, our value, and our service. On the negative, we needed to find a new, much more export-capable factory. So, the past three months have seen me been running all over Zhejiang province (where I am right now writing this blog entry) trying to find a new factory. I think we might have found one, but it will take a lot of work to make sure that their quality and their processes are as detailed as our former factory. Yet another difficulty we'll have to overcome if we want to make this thing work, but nobody said it would be easy...

So that's it for now, more updates to come!

Sometimes being an entrepreneur is great, other times not so much. I am now 2 hours into a 6 hour bus ride from Shanghai to Wenzhou to sign a contract with a new factory so that they can produce in time for our May 1st launch. The bus, with a less-than-delightful mix of odors circulating around the crowded seats, has very little legroom for your average Chinese man, let alone a 6 foot 2 foreigner. Underneath me in the luggage compartment sits 2 large rolls of linen for our Off the Rack line, which I had to haul through the bus terminal and past endless streams of staring Chinese people, all talking about me with no idea that I could understand every word. "Why would a foreigner be taking so much fabric on the bus," one woman said to her husband while they both shared a bag of sunflower seeds. "He has a big nose, but its not the biggest I've ever seen," said one onlooker.

The snoring guy next to me losing the loudness contest to the atrocious VCD blaring canto-pop. The problem is, I'm the only one who seems to actually dislike this horrible situation, thus further proving my inability to change anything about my surroundings. So, I continue to bury my head in my laptop which is quickly running out of power. What I will do after the battery is gone? I'm not sure, but it will likely involve granola bars and frustration.

I've got a crazy day ahead of me, we're negotiating with a factory to produce our first non-customizable line of blazers in response to some complaints that our prices were a little high. Its our mission to provide a low-cost alternative to the big guys without sacrificing quality and that's why I'm sitting on this bus right now. The factory will produce our products with a low enough cost that we'll be able to undercut just about everyone for certain blazers, all the while giving you a premium product that has every detail you'd expect from a blazer for $500. Connecting the factory floors of China with you the consumer, sans middlemen.

After I sign our contract, and the customary Chinese baijiu has been consumed in mass quantities, I'm getting on a plane at 10pm to fly back to Shanghai. Then, another day of madness in anticipation of our May 1 launch. Over and out from the middle of Zhejiang province.

For those trend followers looking to impress your supervisor at your internship this summer or just looking for sexy time in front of the lens, you may want to elongate yourselves by downsizing your suit size. According to fashion-watchers at NYT, going slim is the mainstream in mens fashion.

With slight deviations to reflect taste, the specs of the contemporary man's suit are as follows: a two-button closure; narrow lapels in a high-notch or peak style; high armholes; narrowly set and thinly padded shoulders; low-waist, slim-cut pants with hems that never quite touch the top of the shoes, daring to bare (just as women first did a century ago) a bit of sock or skin.

You'll be able to fit into this and in your own personal touch of style this May with the anticipated relaunch of DressMonkey.com.

Just think of what DressMonkey can do for this guy...wonders...

Another day, another trade fair.

I'm sitting in the Beijing airport, without internet access and mildly hungover, and feeling quite accomplished after a very successful trade fair over the past two days. This close to our launch it was kind of a risk for me to get away for 3 days in order to chase the holy grail of Chinese factory connections, the Beijing Intertex Trade Fair, but I thought it was worth it and it turned out to be just that.

I arrived late Wednesday night, the buses stopped running so I had to pay way too much money to cab it into the city. I was staying with a friend, Eli, so he and his roommate picked me up as the cab didn't drop me off at the correct place. He has an insane old motorcycle with a sidecar, which became my primary mode of transport to and from the fair during those next 24 hours. I woke up the next morning and drove around for a while with Eli in his hog, and it was totally a different way of seeing Beijing. It was so much more real and authentic than my previous trips to Beijing where I was restricted to the dreaded hotel-office-bar triumvirate that any young traveling office monkey has to endure. I was here on business, but I actually enjoyed every second of it as staying with Eli and his roommate, Kro, was such a breath of fresh air (although their apartment is has poor circulation and an abundance of wounded soldiers).

The first day at the fair was kind of a waste, actually. The fair in Beijing is split between two venues, but what they don't tell you in the trade show listing (or maybe I was too lazy to look), split actually means that 95% of the apparel fabrics are at one venue, and 5% are at the other. Sadly, I chose the other for my first day in "the shit." I gathered about 20 different namecards for a variety of DressMonkey ingredients, then quickly scuttled off to Eli's showroom on the corner of the forbidden city. Eli is a distributor for pretty much every skateboard and snowboard or related apparel company looking to sell in China. His showroom, ideally placed and well designed, was the product of a lot of hard work on his part and he deserves all the success that's coming to him at the moment. Though he's got a very tough job, as he's selling premium stuff in a country that loves to duplicate and undercut. After hanging out at the showroom, he and I grabbed a ceremonial Beijing duck, and then he left for the airport on his way to the beaches and ladyboys of Phuket (to see his girlfriend).

On the second day, I rose again, creating nothing but a little gas from the beijing duck the night before. I hurried off to the larger of the two venues and literally talked to 50 or 60 people in 5 hours. When I go to a trade show, its not the vendors who have to do the selling, its me. I've written about this countless times before, but I can't stress it enough about doing business here, China is all about big volumes. Take a look around wherever your sitting now. I bet that at least 50 percent of the clothes your wearing, trinkets in the room, and even your furniture, was made in China. And it wasn't just made for you, everything you own was made at least 40,000 times over by the same factory workers. Factories here don't even know how to count below 1,000, let alone produce in volumes under it. Its just not in their business interests to do so, thus its my job to sell DressMonkey, sell our future potential to these people. Some agree or keep listening, but most do the annoying wave hello (but really goodbye) and say, "Not a chance (bu keneng)." So I have to give the same intro, in Chinese, every single time to every vendor who has something that I think you all will like, and there is a lot that I think you will like at these shows. Another annoying aspect about these trade fairs is that the really good vendors are usually packed with people looking at their fabrics and talking to their salespeople, and the crap ones are always vacant with bored salesmen sitting and playing with their cellphones. Therefore, its especially hard to get and maintain someone's attention when your talking about producing 100-200 meters of this cashmere blend, when some guy named Sergio from Milan wants 100,000 meters of the same thing. Damn you, Sergio, with the hot Italian assistant who looked like Monica Belucci, she will work for me one day!

Once you get past all of these obstacles, the trade show can actually be rewarding. I found a ton of suppliers for our fall line, met some interesting people, and had an absolute great time with Eli and Kro. Last night I went out to Kro's restaurant called, what else but, "The Kro's Nest." He's got the cheapest Guinness draft in China (45 RMB), and probably the best Pizza I've tasted west of the Hudson, its that good. The plane is boarding, and I fear I'm dreading which one of these people I'll have to sit next to for the next two hours on my way back to Shanghai.

Over and Out