We're just hours away from releasing our new line of bamboo and cotton blended velvet fabrics!

No, I'm not getting married, for once Jeff is actually closer to that than I am, with someone far hotter than your girlfriend. My love life now consists of DressMonkey and ordering-in. But it's all gravy (do people still say that?), we're going gangbusters here at DM HQ! We've had a recent spike in orders following the post-Christmas lull, probably due to the flood of press we've just been getting.

I'm more than excited, because we've got a few great articles written about us and also the fact that we just completed ANOTHER wedding order. The suits came out great, and I hope that he's as satisfied as I was to measure and generally admire the fabric and craftsmanship of that there order. I can't wait to see pictures of all the spiffy grooms all done up, and hopefully that will mean we are that much closer to formally launching our wedding line. Right now we are sort of ad-hoc with that process, fielding orders only when they approach us, but I feel that with the success of this order, you'll start to see some new changes around here at DM, notably wedding offerings but finally we'll expedite the release of our pants line. You asked for it, we're responding and hopefully we'll have them up soon, but no timetables yet gang.

Things are all swell here in Shanghai, I'm starting to really enjoy the single life here, now I know what people keep talking about when they refer to Shanghai as sin city. Also, you'd be surprised how efficient one can be without a girlfriend. I have developed a complex algorithm that I'd like to impart on all of you with a ball and chain:

Man + Girlfriend + Full Time Job/Own Business = Inefficiency + Stress
Man + Full Time Job/Own Business = Efficiency + Freedom

That formula will change lives, bank on it.

In other news, we've got a whole new line of Bamboo fabrics that we'll be publishing by the end of the week. I'm excited to announce these, its been a long time coming and they are finally getting published online. I'm now struggling with uploading all this to our server, and it being in the US causes slow-load problems because of China's less than awesome network speeds. What I would give to go back to Switzerland or Japan where files download or upload faster than you can even realize you clicked submit.

We've got a great new employee named Xiao Pu (don't laugh at the name) who helps me with quality control. I head hunted him from our previous factory and he knows the DM 101 better than anyone as he helped develop our original line of blazers during MMM3, MMM2B, and even MMM back in the day. He's great, and your jackets will look that much better now that he's on board.

Thats it from me, hope all is well!

What Makes DressMonkey So Fresh? Take The Tour...

Dressmonkey enthusiasts, your time is now! Well,l in about a month any way. You asked for it and we're delivering, full suits! Yes, you read that correctly, we'll have pants available for purchase in about a month. Though we wanted to stay blazer purists, the overwhelming outpouring of customers looking for matching pants with their stylish blazers was enough to sway us. Here's how its gonna go down...this, like most of this company's moves will be done in sort of a testing phase. We'll launch the availability of pants, though its up to you slack-ers (I should write for the Simpsons)...to contact us with your pants aspirations. More to come on that later...

We're also about to launch two new wools, and two new velvets! The wools are in the above picture, and the velvets will be our latest attempt at being green...Bamboo and Cotton blended into a ridonkulously soft and shimmery black and also brown velvet. This way if you are ever trapped in Sichuan province, being attacked by pandas, at least you have something to throw at them when they lunge for you. DressMonkey Velvets...protecting you from Pandas and the earth from you since 2006. I love it.

More later, sorry for the random post, I've gotta go get decked out for my 80's debutante ball...(I'm single, and I'm telling Shanghai that a young entrepreneur is back on the market...to the sounds of Pat Benetar)

Peace from the east!

Finally, we're back online!

We apologize for being out of touch for what seems like an eternity. The reason for our exodus from an online presence had to do with a major technical glitch that occurred while changing web hosts. By changing web locations, we had to also change our blog platform and re-publish onto our new servers, which may sound like a simple to do, but it turned out to be a nightmare of a project.

Long story short, we are back from the grave, with lots of new DM gossip to share with all of you.

Coley and I have been have been working around the clock for weeks getting everything ready for our official launch in 10 days. On June 5th (cross your fingers), DressMonkey will have a new home online, one that we feel will is a definite upgrade from this one.

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

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!

Site of what may soon become DressMonkey's second custom-tailoring house - Ningbo 01/28/07

We're currently in negotiations with a factory in Ningbo - 6 hours south of Shanghai - that would provide DM with not only a second manufacturing facility in time for our Spring launch, but also access to more efficient and higher-end production capabilities. Benefits include lower production costs per unit, inventory services that would enable us to store our fabric on location, easier exporting, and the piece of mind that our products are being produced side-by-side with designer name brands.

11:36PM Coley: running into a bit of trouble sourcing the seersucker nobody seems to have it in stock we may have to splurge for it, 1,000 M if we want it at 30 RMB a meter, that ain't good

11:38 PM or we wait till the March fabric fair in Beijing

-gchat message 01/27/07

Coley and I have a decision to make: we're estimating higher customer demand during Fall/Winter seasons than in Spring/Summer, but do we investment more now for a cotton-fabric staple at the risk of added inventory costs down the road?

Suddenly the Southern Gentlemen scream BUY THE SEERSUCKER CHEAP ASSES!