Metallic birds, butterflies, and flowers went out to the Apply email list this morning.
They came from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art collection. We turned them into stickers, put together the launch, and sent the collaboration into the world. The subject line called it “100+ Years in the Making,” which is a pretty funny timeline for a tiny sheet of stickers.
The finished thing looked simple. The work around it was not.
Apply was deep in line sheets for museum stores, production orders, partner reports, product copy, and wholesale outreach. That week alone had work moving with LACMA, the Walker Art Center, the Whitney, MoMA, and a New Yorker proposal. Michaels Marketplace had also approved us as a seller, while the integration still needed attention.
This was not my only job.
I had recently joined Wahoo and was spending the same day in planning meetings and working through all the questions that come with a new job. The LACMA launch did not wait for the Wahoo calendar, and the Wahoo calendar did not wait for Apply.
That overlap was the normal version of Apply by then. The company had a real catalog, real partners, and a real operating load. It also still fit into the open spaces around a full-time role, which meant early calls, late files, and checking whether an image had loaded correctly while another calendar kept moving.
The glamorous part was a collaboration with a major museum.
The actual part was making sure the product data was right, the file existed in the correct format, the packaging could be produced, the store had what it needed, and the partner report went out. There were a lot of folders. There were even more versions.
I liked both sides of it. The finished sticker was fun. The system behind it was also fun, at least to me. A small physical product can touch licensing, manufacturing, ecommerce, fulfillment, merchandising, and retail before it reaches a laptop or water bottle.
The launch email went out. Then we opened the next line sheet.