Biz, blessings & a martini

AvantGarb has been a growing, productive business for a really long time.

I started AvantGarb in my Berkeley, California garage when my youngest daughter was about 3 months old.

Month after month AvantGarb has made a profit and those dollars have increased through the years.

AvantGarb is a real, ongoing operation.

Even though we get grow each and every year, get more marvelous clients, are able to hire extraordinary people, and have moved to jazzy new digs. Even though I've been paying my mortgage, clothing my children, going on vacations, buying shoes, getting my hair done and my eyebrows tamed, I still think, it could be over tomorrow.

This is crazy thinking.

When I am sitting with a curved needle, stitching yellow muppet fleece to green fur, I have taken to counting my blessing.

Here are some of them:

• I have a really grand family. They keep me involved and interested in their lives. My husband is funny, handsome and sexy. My daughters are gorgeous and glorious
• I  love my biz - making fuzzy critters that add a great dollop of fun to the landscape.
• I've traveled everywhere--okay, not everywhere, but a lot of places - Kenya, India, China, Mexico, Mexico, Mexico, Taiwan, Egypt, and oh yeah, Europe. I feel fluent in the world. I like to be places where I can't speak the language.
• ... however, I can speak Spanish, stutter through French and be polite in Swahili
• Every Monday I look forward to the week ahead.
• I interact with a wide and varied creative community of mascot people, art people, writers and imagineers.
  
• Every Friday I come home to a really good martini.
  
• I love going to church on Sundays, singing hymns w/ the congregation, listening to the sermon and being blessed for the coming week with the benediction.
• I love reading the New York Times and napping on couch on Sunday afternoons.
• I have gotten bit of fame for doing what I do.
• ...and I have magnificent friends. Some I've had for most of my life, some I've only just met
  

I am truly blessed. I have imagined my life, and it became real.

I suspect the story of other small biz people is similar.

Happy Thanksgiving!

My Tender Heart for Mascots

Sometimes creation just buzzes along at AvantGarb. We have enough of the right foam to build the body, we have plenty of the right kind of helmets to put inside the heads, we have the fur, the right shapes for the eyes and the right color soles for the mascot shoes. We have plenty of time to get the mascot done, everybody is in top mental and physical shape, and the tunes on the CD player are just the right tunes.

Sometimes the music is wrong, we have 3, but not 4 helmets for the 4 mascot we're making, the right-sized eyes for 3 and a half mascots and enough fur for everything but the paws. Someone has a pulled nerve and can only sew standing up and someone else sound like one big germ on the phone, and I beg her not to come in.

There always a time in both the projects that go smoothly, and the projects that have a few ohmygoodness, panic moments when I fall completely in love with the character we are creating. It always happens. I will look at the nose I have just finished and my heart will melt, because it is a beautiful, big, fuzzy nose and it just warms my soul, and I know it will warm the souls of all who see it---it could be the ears, a tuft of hair---the shoes. Something will click in my heart, and I know we are about to send a great, big, bundle of fun out into the wider world.

Fuzz & Foam: Marketing with mascots

The large, plasma screen with a video of Rex the Dinosaur dancing and miming has to be cleaned several times a day because so many children touch and kiss the screen.

Rex is the mascot for the Children's Museum of Indianapolis. Rex is tall and round with a rainbow belly and a really big tail. Rex gets lotsa love!

Rex is "woven into every thread" of the museum's marketing says, Lisa Townsend, VP of Marketing. He is a vibrant, everyday part of the museum's interaction with its guests.

Rex welcomes children and families to the museum. When it's time to close the museum, Rex has the "Rex Parade". Starting at the top floor of the museum, Rex leads the Rex parade down the ramp and out the door. Children wave flags and skip out of the museum, feeling quite happy and important because they were in the Parade!

What kind of Return on Investment does a mascot really bring?

There are some ways to measure this. You can tally how many mascot plushes/shirts/caps are sold at the store and online. But mascots really bring more than simply dollars out and dollars in return on investment. They bring brand loyalty.

When a mascot is around everyone in the mascots range becomes part of each other's community. Mascot mean fun. When your brand is connected with fun and community, your mascot is making friends, and the mascots friends become friends of the brand, and friends of the brand become, well, loyal customers

Your target audience is forever expanding when a mascot enters the picture.

Pharaoh Rex at the opening of the Tut Exhibit
@ the Chidren's Museum of Indianapolis

Fat Mascots Dance!

Ya gotta love the mascots!

I'm grateful that I'm surrounded by this fuzzy silliness every day.

We were thinking about what fun it would be to have a buncha fat mascots dancing to Beyonce's "Single Ladies"

OHMYGOODNESS!!!!