raw materials

As I may have mentioned, we are in the throes of putting together our initial orders with some of the distributors and manufacturers that we’ll be working with. Today I stumbled across The Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies. I guess there are some products there that you shouldn’t plan on seeing.

But look at a little closer, and I think you will find some of those supplies in our store. You may think that the ellipse template or stainless steel T-square are antiquities, but there is still some demand for them, and our distributors still carry them.

Today I spent some quality time at a nearby shelving store (near 7th and san pedro), looking at our shelving options for the store.

This is an example of the taller gondola-style shelving that we will probably have more than a few of in the store.

We still have to figure out exactly which shelving we want, and then coordinate the delivery and installation with the construction we are having done, but the selection at the store looked good, and the prices reasonable.

We’ll just have to do the buying a little earlier in the day, when the owner isn’t quite so toasted.

It isn’t located in the store yet, but we just got all the equipment for our point-of-sale system and I’ve been putting it together and making sure it all works. Because all of us are Mac-based, it is also Mac-based.

The heart of the system is a 20″ iMac, and it’s hooked up to a Symbol LS2208 barcode scanner, a Star TSP143U receipt printer, and an APG Vasario VB32-BL1616 cash drawer.

We will be using Checkout as our point-of-sale software. It’s beautiful software that integrates well with the MYOB AccountEdge software that we’ll be using for our bookkeeping.

We got the iMac through the Apple Store, but it’s a refurbished model, not brand-new. The scanner, printer, and cash drawer all came from Barcode Bonanza, who did a great job of calling me to add a necessary cable that I forgot to order, and dealing with my credit card being rejected because my spending spree had raised the fraud flags.

Now all we need is a counter to put this on, and some products to sell!

We are organized as a general partnership, and one of the many documents we had to file with local (city, county, state) government is the Statement of Partnership Authority (GP-1). We mailed this to the state back towards the end of May, after we formally inaugurated our partnership, and recently we have been itching to get the certified copy back because we need it to complete opening our bank accounts.

After a call to the Secretary of State’s Document Filing Support Unit last week, I found out that they had indeed received our documents on May 27, but that it had been referred to an examiner because there were attachments. They forwarded me to her voice mail, but I didn’t get a call back. I called again yesterday, and left another message.

Today, I finally got a call back — and the news that our filing was going to be rejected because it didn’t have the proper number of signatures, and the attachments we had included were not appropriate.

It took them about seven weeks, from the time we sent the documents, for them to tell us this. It made me long for the easy days of waiting in line at the other government offices. At least any problems with the forms there were dealt with on the spot.

So we’ve had to re-file, without the attachments and with enough signatures. But this time we’re utilizing the services of Sun Document Filings (no relation to my other employer, Sun Microsystems), which should result in a one-week turnaround.

If you take a walk by the store, you may notice that we have shed the solid roll-up door in favor of a new grille door. Now you can see into the space all of the time. Soon you’ll start seeing that space get built out and fill up with stuff.

The installation was done by Kim’s Roll-up Doors.