Thursday, February 27, 2003

by the Writer's Guild of Wunderland

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• New Product: The Empty City
• We're sponsoring a robotics team!
• The Ember Update: Gone Looney, Audium & Columbia, David
• GinohnNews: Snow! Woo Hoo! and Still Even More Snow
• Last week's HMRs: Kama Sutra and Y Tu MamÁ TambiÉN
• Pictures of pitchers and mugs by Gina and a slideshow for 2003 (so far)

This has been the snowiest winter we've had in these parts in years. I didn't update this page last week because we were still in New York, snowed in during Toy Fair... and as I work now on this week's update, it's snowing again, adding yet more to the previous layers which have yet to fully melt away.

The blizzard that struck DC last week was just starting when we began driving up to New York City for Toy Fair, and 2 days later, it arrived up there with all the same ferocity. Luckily, we were all moved in and the trade show underway by then, and since the Big Apple is a city that can handle big snowstorms without flinching, they never even had to shut down the event. Even so, the second day of the four day show was nearly frozen out by the 20" of snow that fell out of the sky that day. Since our hotel was very close to the convention center, we had no real trouble getting to the Javit's Center in the snow, and most of our exhibitor peers did likewise; but the buyers and other attendees we were there to see mostly stayed away that day. Still, we did good business at our booth during the other 3 days of the show, and it was fun in its way to have time for once to wander around and look at other companies' booths without feeling like we were missing the chance to meet with someone at our own booth.

I suppose I should have some photos here of amazingly tall snowdrifts, but most of the photos I took last week were of our booth at Toy Fair. As you can see, we decided to adapt our Halloween costumes from last year into a booth uniform, and I think we looked really cool.

Our full-time staff on this expedition consisted of myself, Kristin, Alison, and our newest crew member, Marlene, who's taking over our sales department as of this week. On the right is Alvaro, our free-lance sales associate, who lives in NYC and joined us on the first day of the show. As usual, his gregarious enthusiasm was an inspiration to the rest of us.

Anyway, it turned out to be a fine show despite the snow... in fact, it was kind of fun! By comparison, we had a lot more trouble dealing with the snow when we got back home than we did while in New York.

We're very excited to officially announce that Marlene Bruce (known to my readers as Ember) is now a full time employee of Looney Labs! We have been overworked and in need of help for a long time now, and when the opportunity to hire Mar came along, we took a hard look at our finances and decided that the money is there to hire some help. Few people we know offer the combination of skills Mar brings to the table, and since we've known each other for most of our lives, we know we'll be able to work well together.

I've known Mar since she and my little sister were kids and best friends. Many years later (back in 1995) Kristin hired her to do marketing and graphics work at a new startup called TSI-TelSys which Kristin had just left NASA to help build. They made a great team and had a great time helping to build that company together for just over two years, but when things got tight and the lay-offs began, Mar was let go. (Kristin continued to work there until she jumped off the cliff to work full-time at Looney Labs in early 1999.) Mar moved on and had a series of up-and-down experiences with other start-ups, including most recently a new novelty items manufacturer in California. And when she started talking about moving back home, we brought her on as our part-time webmaster, and started scheming to get her on board full-time.

Beside the good personality fit, Mar is just who we need right now, for many reasons. Her web design expertise (gained working with evolt.org and elsewhere) will be of great usefulness to us as we refine the interfaces and functionality of SuperFRED. Her experiences at UnderOneLeaf.com will be vital as she takes over the sales department. Her background in art and graphics work will be great when she has time to help me create marketing materials, and her Macintosh knowledge will be useful as she helps us in maintaining our network of computers. She even earned a teaching certificate years ago (although never became a teacher) which will be great when we dig in to work on the Educational Ideas section of our web site -- and she's even a drug law reform activist! She's the ideal employee for our hippie game company, and we're thrilled to have her help.

Incidentally, she's also been dating my brother Rash for well over a year, and although they are now separated by the width of our continent, Rash has long-term plans to move back here as well. Mar seems so much like a member of the family already that it just seemed obvious for us to hire her when she decided to move back to Maryland. Welcome aboard, Mar!