American Made, Cincinnati Made

Recently VisuaLingual of OTR was in Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia’s inaugural American Made competition. We won't know the winner until Oct 8th, so until then Maya invited me to tour what constitutes their production space right as they were getting ready for a huge retail shipment of Seed Bombs to Restoration Hardware and Anthropologie. The reason for the visit? To see why they're in need of the $10,000 prize.

They need more space, and I would add, a ground floor location. I can't imagine having to carry raw materials up three floors and then all the finished products back down three flights. Crazy, but they do what they have to do. Maya says the Restoration Hardware order was their biggest most complex order to date, 133,920 individual seed bombs in 70 cartons on 4 skids weighing in at 2,700 lbs.
How did a couple of designers get all tied up in this? It all started with the idea of a seed bomb; could they could be produced and marketed as a product? And from there Maya says it got crazy. What started out on their dining room table led to stories in Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. 100 seed bomb packets has turned into an almost overwhelming amount of work in cramped quarters.

Looking around the space at what they were doing got me thinking about just how labor intensive manufacturing is, no getting around it. But even with all the lip service it gets from politicians manufacturing doesn't get any love, it just isn't glamorous. To contrast, tech is sexy- no one ever got in trouble throwing money at it. I guess what gets me is that no one is asking the right questions. Low tech businesses like local, non-chain retail and manufacturing requires a copious amount of people and a large support system creating jobs and all that money stays right here in the area. On the other hand, tech firms require few people or resources, you end up with a tech firm like Giftiki which got mentoring and $20k from the Brandery. They raised a million dollars, were sold and the developers all moved to California.
I'm not picking on the Brandery, the people there are doing incredible things, I just know a little more about them because they've gotten tons of press lately. And VisuaLingual, I suppose there are worse things in the world than demand for your product beginning to outstrip your ability to supply it.[where: 45202] best place to learn how to live downtown cincinnati ohio the ethos of Cincinnati

5 seed bombs tossed