Obviously, we’re pretty keen on Instagram. It’s the platform that created us and made us who we are. But this week we thought it would be nice to take a look at some photographers that are keeping the real Polaroid tradition alive. Gloria Marigo is one of them.
Her prints make us want to wear flowers in our hair and pirouette down the street. In fact, their ethereal qualities remind us a little bit of what it’s like to have a summer vacation again; nearly two months of sunshine with nothing to care about but getting home for dinner. Plus, she takes pictures of cats and you know we love cats.
You can buy her work in her Etsy shop and even follow her on Facebook, where she’ll keep you informed on everything that’s coming up in her wonderful, dream-like world. It’d sure look good on a coaster.
John Biggs may just be our favourite TechCrunch writer ever after posting this amusing story to their site. And it got us thinking, just how much power could a coaster have?
Yeah, we know they’re good for keeping your surfaces ring-free and looking pretty on an otherwise blank canvas but is there more to the humble coaster than meets the eye?
In this story, Clara was flummoxed by what she was presented; evidence of her husband’s affair. But what else could a Coastermatic coaster be useful for?
The roller coaster – a cheap alternative to the fun fair
Making buttons for giants
Practicing your stone skimming
Send us your other ideas and we may just feature them right here.
As I type, Tash is squashing bugs and working through legal paperwork. It’s not the most glamorous job, but good to get out of the way early in the day. This week we’re sharing our space with a course in Data Narratives, so things will be slightly busier around here, but I’m sure the smart minds in attendance will be inspiring.
Here’s a quick run down of our progress over the past week:
- Molly, the cat, took care of a random selection for the Friday giveaway. This was a lot less exciting than I was anticipating. The softness of her feet combined with reluctance and confusion toward walking over a graphics tablet were stumbling blocks we didn’t anticipate losing so much time to. Still, it was a fun experiment.
- Tash spoke with a PR friend about alternative marketing approaches. Our problem to date has been explaining the weight and materiality of our coasters. We’ve been considering offline approaches as these seem ideal for the medium, but we keep running into scale issues. Tash’s pal opened our eyes to the possibilities of targeted online advertising and timely mailouts.
- Our product packaging has evolved. We’ve moved from precisely (and awkwardly) cut tissue paper to shredded paper. This increases our packing speed and reduces the cost of packaging supplies. Double-win.
- Tash is continuing with the server migration process. It’s a hulking beast that continues to eat up time, but we’re learning lots of valuable lessons.
- We had our first order from a private Instagram account. It turns out this doesn’t play nicely with the system we’ve created so we’re figuring out a more sustainable workaround.
- We had some kind press this week, including an article dissecting our tabletop video, from Brazilian publication, Hypeness. This lead to an influx in orders from Brazil. We’re pleased our high shipping cost haven’t been too offputting, because we can’t do much to reduce them, given the weight of 4 pieces of stone.
This week we’re somewhat splitting our time between Coastermatic and other commitments, before Tash heads away on a well-deserved week long break. We’re looking forward to getting the server migration complete and launching customer-facing gift code purchasing, meaning you’ll be able to give the gift of coasters to give your friends for all those summer bbqs you’ll be heading to. We have another feature we’re really excited about launching, more details on that coming soon.
