Arrival dates for India's summer monsoon (Wikimedia Commons)
What does a weather map of India’s monsoons have to do with our little company in the states? Well, the other day I asked Andrew and Hudson to relate some milestones from the ten years since we put out our first catalog. And as we all know, such a stroll down memory lane can sometimes result in your beginning every new recollection with the phrase, “Now it seems pretty funny, looking back on it, but…”
So borrowing the countdown formula from a popular late-night show, I’ll offer here Wisteria’s Top Ten Things We Just Happened To Notice From Our First Decade of Putting Out a Catalog.
10. Having Andy Rooney hold up your catalog on 60 Minutes could be considered good PR.
9. The nuances of making sure a shipping container full of Christmas merchandise arrives on time at the warehouse is a lot like landing a jet on an aircraft carrier.
8. It’s possible to get so carried away with bubble wrap that you actually overlook packing something inside it.
7. Ordering a new product with the specifications, “white upholstery/weathered wood” will create a thing of beauty, but swapping the adjectives can result in something else altogether.
6. Zeros, not only how many but also where they’re placed, are really important.
5. If two different suppliers in Daryapur, India are late with their orders, one claiming monsoons and the other claiming drought, could one of them be fudging a little?
4. If a factory owner impresses you with a picture of a building and it turns out to be a stock photograph, he probably just meant, “My building looks like this one. Sort of.”
3. Archaic cultural symbols carved into every piece from your big order of vintage Asian animal sculptures can bear an uncanny resemblance to the insignia of the Third Reich.
2. In the exhilarating rush of opening your first retail store, twenty thousand square feet may not sound like all that much.
1. The Rusty Paper Clip Rule: A rusty paper clip that, for years on end, has served faithfully to hold together broken plumbing parts will wait until the rush of the Christmas season to break, thus flooding a warehouse crowded with employees, half of whom desperately needed to use that very restroom.
