TL;DR
User is requesting 10ETH in retroactive funding for manufacturing, shipping, and distributing 1500 pairs of Noggles throughout NFT NYC 22’.
Breakdown of costs:
Cost of Manufacturing - $2.86 per pair x 2000 = $5720
Cost of Shipping - $1191.00 Express Shipping
Cost of Shipping from home to NYC - 15 x $18.45 (USPS Large Flate Rate Boxes) = $276.75
Cost of Import taxes/fee’s - UPS Bill of $824.14 State Tax $343.20
Time/Proliferation/Travel - Remainder of balance
All costs can be verified with receipts if needed (edited information will be available to avoid dox.)
Quick Background:
Hey Hey! I’m Moti, or MotivateMe - better known for my involvement around the CrypToadz community. My story was actually a long journey, but maybe more on that in another thread. Throughout the time I’ve been involved with NFTs, I’ve continued to grow in the Web3 space by engaging in other communities and likeminded individuals, exploring avenues, sharing journeys etc. Not being the large extrovert that I may come off as, I wanted to bring items to NFT NYC 2022 as a means of ‘breaking the ice’ when meeting people for the first time.
Story:
**Names are edited to protect identities of individuals
This story begins May 5th 2022, 6 1/2 weeks before I’d be leaving for NFT NYC. The manufacturer mentions this is a very tight timeline and in most businesses, especially overseas, would be near impossible. We would need to act quickly. There would be no time for them to send me a sample pair of the glasses - they would have to send me the entire order. What I received is what I would be taking with me. Nervous to the idea and the quality of the item I would get, there was just no time to pander, I accepted.
May 6th - The following day the manufacturer already had the 3D iteration built, but how?? Well, after sharing the content of 4156’s post (Link to item), the manufacturer went down the rabbit hole and found the wonderful Salvino D’Armati’s luxury glasses that they were building. In their posts, they included dimensions and while my glasses would be no where near as grandeur, it was very important in the creation process (Thank you Salvino!).
May 9th-10th - Fast forward just a few days while I waited for the first sample pair to be created and the manufacturer came back with the following outline. There they were, Noggles fresh off the press. What a relief!
Until…I noticed the nose bridge was all one shape.
The manufacturer missed the slopping shape outline and just like that, 3 days of our timeline has been pushed back…pressure was on!!
May 11-12th
The manufacture provided me with a 3D design that shows the width increase around the nose bridge. Fantastic! They then provided me with a picture of the physical glasses later that day but had them on their face. For privacy reasons, we’ll exclude that picture out of it. They also provided a video of the lenses but that’s in a video format that’s not supported by Discourse!
May 18th
Over a week later and only 4 weeks remaining until my flight, they provided images of the casting around the glasses. They verified the palette choices were correct. Things were starting to come to life! Which do you prefer, the red or the blue? Let me know below!! Oh and thanks to BigShotty for helping with the palette (BigShotty Twitter)
Later that same day… there it was:
To recap - we went from an idea, to a 3D sketch on May 5th, to a physical item on May 18th. All in under 2 weeks. A few days go by, I check in on the shipping status and all was going well. There was still some work left to do when it arrived.
Fast Forward June 11th
The glasses arrived all in once piece, but the boxes they arrived in were unsalvageable. I would have to figure out another way to get the items to New York and I would have to figure that out fast. In less than a week I would be in NY so I wanted to ship the items out at least 2 days before my departure.
I had to repackage all the glasses with what boxes I had around my apartment from previous jobs. Fortunately, Large Flat Rate boxes from USPS seemed to do the trick and I could store about 100 glasses per box. I only had 16 total boxes available, so this is where I was restricted to only shipping 1500 Noggles. Time to get packing.
June 20th and on
Packages arrived in Hotel and below is the handful of images I was able to get/see on my twitter feed.
These glasses have made it into major NFT events, Moonbirds - Cooltopia - Art Blocks - EGirls - Photography Events - places like Time Square and even Yankee’s Stadium!! I recently shipped a pair all the way to a friend in Dubai.
Dump of images/tweets (no particular order)
Deeze Tweet
Evanodette Tweet
Moti Tweet
Brinkman Tweet
Redbeard Tweet
Geebz Tweet
Loafin Tweet
Marlo Tweet
Conclusion
Incredible experience. I would absolutely do it all over again if I had the choice to. To improve this in the future, I would try to plan out my week with what events wanted pairs dropped off, this way I wouldn’t be lugging around the boxes. In addition, I’d like to make another proposal in the future to be a distributor of these less-grandeur version of Noggles so that other individuals get to feel the Nounish experience.
Nouns event next NYC?? I got the glasses!