Tales of a Sourcer: Spy Glasses

In this series the names of the clients and manufacturers have been changed to protect the innocent and the useful. I had a client who was in the network optimization space. She was super to work with and we did a lot of cool stuff over the years. As it sometimes happens, she made a career move to another organization. Before she left she gave me the contact info of the person who I would be working with going forward. The new person was nice, she took my phone calls. I had done about 15-20 quotes for her and not received any business. I know she's passing my quotes to her person who then beats my quote by a penny. That sometimes happens too.

One day I call her up and she said, "We need five thousand pairs of Spy Glasses like you'd see in the back of comic books. We're doing a trade show in Europe and need them quickly." This is the fun part of my job. I know people who make the red/green 3D glasses people used wear at 3D movies. They also have a variety of other lenses that create special effects. I give them a call. They don't have Spy Glasses. We could design them but we don't really have time for that. I know that's going to be the case with the other makers of groovy glasses and lenticular eye trickery.

I go back to the drawing board. I start looking for dime store, novelty weird stuff. Again I'm going through lists of vendors, making calls that are going nowhere. Then I see Hershel's Novelty Emporium in Brooklyn NY. I'm thinking this is perfect. DC comics was started in NYC in an era when, to place an order, you had to write a letter, include a personal check and send it to the address in the ad. I'll bet Hershel placed half the ads in the back of those comics. I imagined Hershel had a warehouse full of Sea Monkeys, Ant Farms, X-Ray Glasses, Chattering Teeth and Charles Atlas exercise books. Of course he has Spy Glasses. Yes he does. Yes, we can imprint them. Yes, we can make the event date in Europe. No, I don't get this job either.

A few weeks down the road I'm speaking with my contact again. I figure I'll give her a couple more quotes and then forget about her. I ask about the spy glasses. "Did you ever do those?" She said, "Yeah we did but it turned into a fiasco. We had to overnight them to the UK which was a couple thousand bucks. Then they got hung up in Customs. By the time they cleared Customs the show was over and we had to overnight them back to the US." I said, "Wow, that's a bummer. Do you know why they got hung up in Customs?" She said, "No, I don't." I paused, "In the Customs paperwork there is a line: Description of Contents. I will bet you one dollar the person who filled out that form wrote Spy Glasses rather than Novelty Glasses or Marketing Materials." The devil's in the details isn't he? Do you have an, "Oops! Checked the wrong box" story to share?

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