Chapter 17 Spoilage avoided

An Example of Making a Bad Mistake Not so Bad

Lately, I’ve been thinking about Adidas and their Kanye West shoe problem. They have a lot of money tied up in inventory since Kanye voiced anti semitic beliefs torching the Yeezy brand. 

Since my Substack is about books you might be thinking “Is this about an author behaving badly and damaging the ability to sell the product?” No, but  a key to thinking about books is that you can learn a-lot from any product and the problems they have.  I was interested in the options that Adidas had. This article laid them out  The options are as follows, remove the branding and resell at a discount in Adidas stores, sell the inventory in overseas markets where customers might not be aware of Kanye’s antics, or simply destroy the inventory. 

Any time you add to an existing product to fix it you add the cost of that fix to your already sunk cost into the product “as is.” Selling in a market where customers might not notice is interesting and probably difficult with social media making the world smaller and smaller. Destroying the items is the nuclear option.

 I wonder if some of the shoes lend themselves to retooling more than others? You might pull off 30% of the inventory retooling it, 40% in other market sales, and then write off the leftover? One recent twist is that the shoes are fetching high prices in the resale market. I’m sure Adidas wishes they could make that work for them!  

Lately, I’ve been working on solving a problem with unused materials. The lesson with the unused material was that there was no way to convert it to something that didn’t cost a lot of money to make that was feasible to sell at an MSRP that made it viable. The question becomes would you rather trash $2,000 worth of pencils or make a $22,000 pencil holder to try to sell? Well, I went with losing $2,000.00 worth of pencils. 

This reminds me of one of my favorite stories from my time in Publishing. . 

We had a new young vibrant author, FaceBook was still cool and Instagram was really taking off, so aesthetic was crucial. We had a really high bar to hit for the cover direction and I was determined to not let her down. Our sales team said a hip cover was essential. The author came to our office and I asked her to tell me what her closet colors were. I took a pic of the sweater she was wearing. I scoured her Instagram page and took screen shots and sent the palette and textures to the cover designer.  We got a great cover. That helped her feel better and better about the book.

We got down to the days to turn in the files and there were last minute changes. Copy changes to the back copy and a request to move her name on the spine. We didn’t send it back to the designer, we let the preflight team grab it because the files were already late. You never really want to do that but when it’s last minute it’s tempting to take any break on time you can get. It’s feasible we would have missed our on sale deadline if we didn’t. 

Some of you are cringing right now because you know to avoid last minute changes. Usually, they aren’t worth it. I always ask, “Is it egregious or a preference?” If it’s a preference let it go. If it’s egregious, then by all means, fix it. This one was not egregious but we took last minute shortcuts knowing the risk. A few weeks later we got samples from the run to approve before the bulk shipped from China. 

The editor’s face sank. There on the spine was the author’s name overlapped with the foil treatment for the title. How does this get missed?
The book print and the foil print are on different plates, the only way to see this with print is to get overlay proof plates printed on clear plastic. We didn’t do that, because ordering those takes a day or two. 

When things like this happen you have to assess some basic info fast.
1. How many did you make? In our case 20,000
2.How much did they cost? About $2.10 if memory serves.
3. Last thing, how late would the book be if we started over? About 12 weeks. This has big implications for your annual budget.

It seemed like a few days but it was probably a few hours spent gathering the info, figuring out what happened and then figuring out what to tell the author. Trashing the books, apologizing, and missing the release date all looked like the only option. Funnily enough I had run into the author at Chipotle recently and told her she’s in great hands. Nothing to worry about. 

I really wish I’d walked into my boss's office and said, “Is the author cold?” Then she would have squinted at me like she often did and said, “What?” And I would have said, “How would she like a jacket?” 

Though I didn’t pitch my idea that way, that is what I suggested and that’s what we did. We added a jacket. The jacket went on the first printing of the book and probably subsequent printings for a while. The author got to have a jacket on her book and a fun little secret for those that removed the jacket. The title and the author’s name appear perfectly on the spine for the bookshelf in stores. 

Fortunately our Asia vendor had a partnership with a US vendor of ours. We had the US vendor get the template and print jackets with the corrected spine file and prepare them for when the books arrived. The books arrived via ocean freight and went  to be unboxed. I think we had all the books unjacketed and ran them through a machine that applied the jackets, then they were re-boxed with time to spare for the release date. That was about 6-7 years ago. Since then someone has probably removed the jacket from the order to save money and wondered, “Why in the world did they have a jacket in this book’s spec?” Well my intrepid book friend, it could've been worse. 

One more thing, yes adding the jacket and unboxing/reboxing all added cost but it didn’t equal the cost of trashing the books and the release date was met. Release dates are crucial because revenue projections and budgets are built off of them.