New Products?

New Products?

WHERE New Products?

 

Those who follow this website know that we tend to introduce new products many times every year. After 12 years we have around 1600 products online for sale. We introduce new products because we're creative people and because it's fun. The amount of time and money required in research and development of even the simplest product is staggering. It's the narrowest bottleneck in our introduction of those new products.

Since research and development (R&D) is so absurdly slow and expensive, we need to know we're going to make that investment back before we commit the time and funds. We're pretty good at estimating public demand for any given product, so we have a solid business model that has prospered. What we didn't count on was the utter and complete lack of honor exhibited by the Internet's bottom feeders -- those low-lifes who have never thought up a single original product in their lives, but who spend their time watching and copying everyone else's.

In any endeavor in which people interact and compete face to face, the copycat mentality is openly disrespected. That keeps the offensive behavior to some degree in check. That's why our country has laws for the infringement of copyrights and the theft of trademarks -- because, long ago, society realized that these actions were reprehensible, and that honest, creative people needed protection from the scum balls who would steal the ideas and creations of others.

In the Internet world, there isn't nearly as much negative reaction to the dishonorable acts of Intellectual Property thieves. It's a largely anonymous world where the demons most folks mask in public settings are allowed to roam free and wild without much consequence. Copyright and trademark laws still exist, and they're enforceable if you can afford justice, but on the net the thieves have become SO prevalent and SO bold that the sheer volume of infractions makes meaningful enforcement for a small company all but impossible. Even International corporations are beginning to buckle under the load of trying to stop the common Internet shyster from stealing their livelihoods and original, protected ideas. New companies have sprung up which serve no other purpose than to scan the ether 24/7, looking for thefts and infringements perpetrated against their clients, and those companies find mountains and reams of such bad behavior. They may be the only companies to survive and prosper in these larcenous times.

We sold our products locally beginning in 1982 and went online formally in 1996. Every product you find on our site since then with the exception of printed t-shirts, is original (our T's are original of course, but not the idea of printing onto t-shirts). We created our products. Every single one except printed t-shirts. Every other product was researched and developed and put up for sale by US FIRST. In many cases, like our custom-printed giant checks and custom gift-wrap rolls, we offered those things a full DECADE before anyone else and it's easily documented. Now, of course, writing in 2009, we find dozens of little back-bedroom upstarts who offer both of these things and more. They simply copied our ideas. In a handful of cases, the bottom-feeders who copied our products are now representing on their sites that THEY thought-up the product first, even though it's child's play to track our postings of those same products years or even a decade before the scammers who try to claim otherwise!

It's said that Imitation is the "Grandest Form of Flattery". We disagree. But even if we agreed, we don't want so much to be flattered as we want to be paid. Imitation in a commercial context is dishonorable, sleazy, disgusting, cheap, and in many cases actionable in civil AND criminal courts. The copying of an IDEA is much tougher to prosecute than the copying of actual text or imagery, but we're seeing more and more cases of the latter and we now have no choice but to start aggressively nailing these thieves. There's a "fake newspaper" company in the UK, for instance, who has routinely copied our fake news articles nearly word for word. One example is our article depicting a man taking a shower in a carwash. That article was highly successful. Nearly a decade later the sleaze-balls in the UK decided to simply take it as their own. They tried to alter the wording a little, probably thinking they could avoid a lawsuit. (Let's see if they were correct). We could cite dozens of such instances. We'll nail a few of the more blatant examples, but honestly, we just don't have time to spend three days out of every five in court. And these dirty little thieves make us so angry that it's only a matter of time before we end up dragging one of the smirking sons of bitches over the defendant's table and knocking out their Goddamned teeth, right there in the courtroom. Unfortunately we have a highly-developed sense of honor and we really can't stomach those who don't. A few more "Americans" could use a little of that philosophy. When the very concept of basic honor and decency breaks down, as it has in much or most of the population of the United States, no amount of laws can restore order and productivity. People must, for the most part, WANT to do the right thing because they understand the bigger picture. We're not sure that Americans (or the Brits, for that matter) understand much of anything anymore, beyond a desperate, gutter-variety greed, and the blatant taking of what they can get for the moment.

For that reason we will probably not create or make available many, or any, more new products on this website. We have hundreds of ideas that make us laugh out loud every single day. But we can no longer stomach those dishonorable losers who take our ideas as their own and profit from our creativity and hard work. Certainly they don't take all of our revenue from any product. Their products are poor copies of ours. But if each little upstart that comes along takes 5% of our gross profits from a given product, and eight such upstarts sprout up every year, the losses can make our original product no longer worth manufacturing. We lose. And YOU lose. And the schleppers lose too, because it's only a matter of time before the products they copied are copied by others and then it's no longer worth it for THEM to make the products they stole in the first place! After a certain level of dilution NO ONE makes any money.

All of this is called competition. Honest competition can stimulate a market; it can inspire suppliers to be more efficient and to provide better products and customer service. Competition can also cripple good businesses and stifle the efficient movement of goods and services. Who on earth would ever write a book if there was no such thing as copyright protection? Remember when your telephone worked perfectly, every single day, year in and year out? Reception was crystal clear. Calls always got through. And it was all so affordable! That was Ma Bell doing good work at fair prices because competition was held at bay and kept to levels which allowed the best possible product to survive. Now we're nearly reduced to sending smoke signals.

We have a financial interest in a national chain of restaurants. That chain produces the very best of a particular type of food product. That chain is barely showing a profit over the past ten years. There are now SO MANY companies trying to infiltrate a product-line that was never lucrative in the first place that now NO ONE can make a decent living at it! But even so, we watch company after company after company continue to elbow their ways into the same market, thinking SURELY there must be riches for the taking. And in a month or five months, those outfits are bankrupt. But not to worry, because there are a thousand clueless people with a dream and an inheritance to blow, who are POSITIVE "they" can make it where no one else could. There is an absolutely endless supply. The chain that does it best is receding, and the bad products have almost completely taken over. --Here today, gone tomorrow, true enough. But there are twenty more bad product producers the following day, ALL in the process of going broke but too dumb to know it.

We've moved away from online products, meaning any products that are easy for the unscrupulous to copy. We've moved into other areas, and we're releasing products locally which cannot be found on the net by society's dishonest. We may, in time, occasionally post a new product or two on this website, but those will be few and far between. We log the IP addresses of hundreds of competitors and would-be competitors every day who haven't the creativity God gave a fricking crowbar, but they troll our site and others just looking for crumbs they can pick up, copy, and resell. These are the lowest class of human beings on the planet. These folks are barely a grade above drug-dealers and prostitutes and common apartment-thieves and muggers. Customers who support that caliber of company may well save themselves forty cents on a poorly-made Giant Check (or in some cases they'll actually pay more!), but they lose out on all the other products we might have brought them, because we just won't help the lazy and unimaginative make money from our ideas any longer. It's a loss for us. It's a loss for you. And it's a loss for the bottom-feeders themselves, because now they have nothing new to steal. Even most natural parasites have the good sense to stop just short of actually KILLING the host they feed on, because they then have nothing left to feed on at all! Not so the human parasites who suck the life out of businesses whose products they steal and copy. Those folks are dumber than nature's leeches who usually know when to quit.

Next time you see ANY of our product-ideas on someone else's website, why not drop them a note and thank them. They are directly responsible for this page and for the fact that you will no longer have access to our fresh, fun ideas. We just won't make a living for these witless hacks anymore.

TrixiePixGraphics
2009