It’s 6:45 a.m. and my house is quiet. Kirky told me to get some sleep, and the ache behind my
eyeballs agrees. But I’m wired. We just had eight people working like house elves - yes Hermione, I mean it – on the remainder
of the Leaky T-shirts. Packing, labeling, shipping,
taping, recording, sorting, folding, cramming, loading, lifting, driving. And now it’s done, and my friends, who didn’t have
to do a damn thing to convince me, have again proven how amazing they are.
We expected to sell around 200 or so shirts for this drive – we ended up selling 800.
Doing so through some easy manufacturing online place like CafePress would have cut the profit down to $1 or maybe even less a T-shirt, for the same price, which is ridiculous. We can’t donate a significant amount of money to charity like that. So we decided to do it all ourselves, and in so doing gained $6 per shirt in base costs alone – or so we thought.
Our shirt manufacturer shaved an extra dollar off the price of each shirt, tax, screening fees and any extra allowance for the many XL, XXL, and XXXL shirts we ordered.
That’s $1200 in cost. That’s a $1200 donation.
Then the lovely donors just thought they’d throw in an extra fifty cents here, dollar there, round out their $13.50 order to $20, tack on an extra $50. Those penny tosses worked out to over $1100. in added donation.
We didn’t account for PayPal fees, so we were docked a bit – but shipping worked out to less than we had originally been quoted. At $.50 less for half the shirts, and a whole $2.00 less for some others, it adds up to at least an extra $500 in donations – or at least in making up what greedy PayPal took.
And handling, well that wasn’t free, but it didn’t cost anything. We worked our butts off tonight, and Meg (and I, but to a lesser extent) has been busting her bum for weeks. And every time I tore off a label or someone struggled with packing tape, or we complained that a mistake had been made and we had to check 200 orders, I thought, well, there’s a dollar saved in fees, that’s one more book for a kid who needs it. And I picked up the next package. As I’m sure my friends did.
I’ve lost count, I have no idea how much we’re going to end up donating to Book Aid. It’ll be up on leaky soon.
That my friends would come out for a weekend and spend the entire night slaving over packing materials instead of sleeping, and do it cheerfully and swiftly, is just unbelievable.
So unbelievably tired – I am so tired – I’m going to bed. Right now.
We expected to sell around 200 or so shirts for this drive – we ended up selling 800.
Doing so through some easy manufacturing online place like CafePress would have cut the profit down to $1 or maybe even less a T-shirt, for the same price, which is ridiculous. We can’t donate a significant amount of money to charity like that. So we decided to do it all ourselves, and in so doing gained $6 per shirt in base costs alone – or so we thought.
Our shirt manufacturer shaved an extra dollar off the price of each shirt, tax, screening fees and any extra allowance for the many XL, XXL, and XXXL shirts we ordered.
That’s $1200 in cost. That’s a $1200 donation.
Then the lovely donors just thought they’d throw in an extra fifty cents here, dollar there, round out their $13.50 order to $20, tack on an extra $50. Those penny tosses worked out to over $1100. in added donation.
We didn’t account for PayPal fees, so we were docked a bit – but shipping worked out to less than we had originally been quoted. At $.50 less for half the shirts, and a whole $2.00 less for some others, it adds up to at least an extra $500 in donations – or at least in making up what greedy PayPal took.
And handling, well that wasn’t free, but it didn’t cost anything. We worked our butts off tonight, and Meg (and I, but to a lesser extent) has been busting her bum for weeks. And every time I tore off a label or someone struggled with packing tape, or we complained that a mistake had been made and we had to check 200 orders, I thought, well, there’s a dollar saved in fees, that’s one more book for a kid who needs it. And I picked up the next package. As I’m sure my friends did.
I’ve lost count, I have no idea how much we’re going to end up donating to Book Aid. It’ll be up on leaky soon.
That my friends would come out for a weekend and spend the entire night slaving over packing materials instead of sleeping, and do it cheerfully and swiftly, is just unbelievable.
So unbelievably tired – I am so tired – I’m going to bed. Right now.
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