Process Insight - Week 2

This past week has been one of busy work, and experimentation. My goal this week was to finish off all the standing, to-do items. These are things like color adjustments, updating photos, fixing links, etc. Pretty boring and time consuming, but c'est la vie. 

My exciting experimentation involved creating a packet for Picker's Sales. Picker's Sales are sales where nothing is tagged, and customers provide bids on whatever they pick out of the house. Picker's Sales are low-end (>$10,000) and bring a low return, but they cost nothing to prepare, making them an important part of our business. The packet is something that we give prospective clients to inform them of our services and impart a sense of quality, helping to seal deals. Typically, in the industry, you receive a contract, and a one-sheet that his been copied thousands of times.

The needs of the packet were: impressive, cost-effective, and replicable. So, I waddled my way over to the local Hobby Lobby to look for materials. I didn't know exactly what I was looking for, I just knew i wanted some cool textures and an intriguing way to bind it all together. Our branding to our pickers sales is very rural, when compared to the Aether brand.

So I left the store with clothes pins and green vellum. I had the intent of tea staining the wood, giving it a pleasant smell and aged look. I began a series of experiments in my kitchen for the best way to do this. First I steeped tea in a cup and just put a few of the pins to soak up some of the color. Not too much effect, so I decided to add more tea bags and add the constant heat of a stove. After boiling for an hour, I still didn't have the effect I wanted, so I decided to throw them in the oven on my pizza stone at 550F. This worked! I repeated the effect with all of them. I tried tea staining the paper, but it ended up looking like the Declaration of Independence, so I put it in the oven.

This week, writing from St. Louis, is about to take me into unknown waters. I'm at the Certified Appraisers Guild of America Conference with the aims of obtaining my appraisers license. We'll see how it goes.