Unique Stuffs Addict™ Blog

By MICHELLE SLATALLA

The holiday season passes peacefully. I dismantle the tree. And the only nagging social obligation I feel guilty about is not managing to mail out a family greeting card. So I sweep up the pine needles and tell myself everyone will be thrilled to receive the annual photo of my children on Valentine’s Day.

This year was different.

One day last month I found a festively wrapped bottle of wine on the porch. (Thanks, Dawn and Bill.)

It was the start of a trend. The unexpected gift tipped the scales of heaven in my direction. The next day a friend delivered a plate of homemade cookies. (Thanks, Lisa). Another dropped off a holiday wreath to hang on the door. (Thanks, Stephanie.) By the end of December I was the delighted recipient of a sleighful of iced sugar cookies, bottles of Champagne and tiny Christmas tree ornaments (the one shaped like a bird was a regift, but still adorable).

This sort of situation creates a crisis in January.

I call it the response gift syndrome. I know that someday — maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon — I will have to reciprocate. The best way to thank my friends for a gift is with a gift in return.

But what? The last thing I want them to know is that it’s a response gift because I don’t want them to think I’m keeping score (although I am). I don’t want them to think that I think they won’t like me unless I show my gratitude with a gift (although that is my secret fear). Read the rest of this entry »

ThinkGeek started as an idea. A simple idea to create and sell stuff that would appeal to the thousands of people out there who were on the front line and in the trenches as the Internet was forged. ThinkGeek started as a way to serve a market that was passionate about technology, from programmers, engineers, students, lovers of open source, to the masses that helped create the behind-the-scenes Internet culture.

Three out of the four founding ThinkGeek members started an ISP in the Northern Virginia area way way back in 1995. We couldn’t afford Solaris, learned about a free UNIX-like OS, and spent almost an entire day downloading it onto over 50 floppies for installation on an old 486 laptop with no cd-rom (thanks Slackware!). After a few years with the ISP gig, the ThinkGeek idea popped into our heads, and, operating out of a spare room at the ISP office we setup shop and launched the site on Friday the 13th, 1999…

A month or so later we were Slashdotted. Promptly thereafter, ThinkGeek was acquired by the good folks at Andover.Net who through an acquisition and a couple of name changes, is now known as SourceForge, Inc.

All the founding members are still around, and we’ve continued to grow our product line, expand our staff (including several canines) and enhance the way we interact with customers and the community. Who would have thought.

- linkedin.com

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fredflare.com is the online shop and brainchild of Chris Bick and Keith Carollo, two super sweet guys who moved from Chicago to Brooklyn to start their first “boutique” — selling drink coasters off the back of their bike.

Since then, fredflare.com has hit internet stardom as one of the cutest, hippest and happiest web shops in existence — a site not just for shopping, but featuring contests celebrating up-and-coming artists, crafters and designers; interviews; trivia; recipes; an amazing video podcast and heaps and piles of good-natured enthusiasm.

– the Sampler

In the late nineties, novelty designers Chris Bick and Keith Carollo were biking around Soho trying to sell their first creation to stores: disposable coasters. They eventually launched a website—Fredflare.com, named after dancer Fred Astaire—selling their own designs alongside giftable items like Jonathan Adler teapots, Betsey Johnson leg warmers, and Carolyn Keene’s Nancy Drew Cookbook.

The pair opened up their first brick-and-mortar store in New York in 2008, showcasing the best-selling website items and an expanded selection of cheeky, cheerful merchandise. The store has a “country lodge” theme, with scenic mountains painted along the back wall and offerings like plaid flannel dresses, flickering fireplace videos, and log lamps. Tables and shelves are covered with colorful, kitschy items: oversize ice-cream cones, LED-light menorahs, candy-cane shot glasses, Band-Aids that look like bacon strips, and wallets resembling buttered toast. Cutesy wares from Fred Flare’s own line include heart-shaped sunglasses and guitar-pick earrings printed with phrases like “call me” and “rock it.” Read the rest of this entry »

“Etsy is an International Word of Mouth Phenomenon”

Etsy is an online marketplace where people set up shops to sell physical goods they have made by hand. Knitters, painters, potters and musicians use Etsy like millions of other people use eBay. The Etsy community also meets offline, though, at Etsy-sponsored craft fairs in cities around the globe.

Handmade 2.0

…The pledge echoed the idealistic language of a tree-hugger activist group, but actually the consortium’s most prominent member was the online shopping bazaar Etsy, a very much for-profit entity that bills itself as “your place to buy & sell all things handmade.” Etsy does not fulfill orders from an inventory; it’s a place where sellers set up virtual storefronts, giving the site a cut of sales. While eBay rose to prominence nearly a decade ago as an endless garage sale for the auctioning of collectibles and bric-a-brac, Etsy is more of an online craft fair, or art show, where the idea is that individuals can sell things that they have made. How many such people can there be? At last count, more than 70,000 — about 90 percent of whom were women — were using Etsy to peddle their jewelry, art, toys, clothes, dishware, stationery, zines and a variety of objects from the mundane to the highly idiosyncratic. Each seller has a profile page telling shoppers a bit about themselves, and maybe offering a link to a blog or a MySpace page or a mailing list; most have devised some clever store or brand name for whatever they’re selling.

Maybe you’re interested in a “random music generator” called the Orb of Sound ($80), built by an Australian tinkerer calling himself RareBeasts. Or a whistle made out of a tin can and bottle caps ($12), by loranscruggs, near Seattle. Or the “hand-painted antique ceramic doll-head planters” sold under the name Clayflower22 by a retired schoolteacher near Las Cruces, N.M. Or the “Kaleidoscope Pearberry Soapsicle” ($5), made by a woman in Daytona Beach, Fla., who calls her shop Simply Soaps. Or a porcelain bowl with an image of a skull on it, from a Chicago couple who call themselves Circa Ceramics. Or an original painting from an artist in Athens, Ga., who goes by the moniker the Black Apple.

Browsing Etsy is both exhilarating and exhausting. There is enough here to mount an astonishing museum exhibition. There is also plenty of junk. Most of all there is a dizzying amount of stuff, and it is similarly difficult to figure out how to characterize what it all represents: an art movement, a craft phenomenon or shopping trend. Whatever this is, it’s not something that Etsy created but rather something that it is trying to make bigger, more visible and more accessible — partly by mixing high-minded ideas about consumer responsibility with the unsentimental notion of the profit motive.

On July 29, Etsy registered its one-millionth sale and is expecting to hit two million items sold by mid-December. Shoppers spent $4.3 million buying 300,000 items from the site’s sellers in November alone — a 43 percent increase over the previous month. Thus far in December, the site has had record-breaking sales every day. Only about two years old, the company is not currently profitable but is somewhat unusual among Internet-based start-ups of the so-called Web 2.0 era in having a model that does not depend on advertising revenue. It depends on people buying things, in a manner that the founders position as a throwback to the way consumption ought to be: individuals buying from other individuals. “Our ties to the local and human sources of our goods have been lost,” the Handmade Pledge site asserts. “Buying handmade helps us reconnect.” The idea is a digital-age version of artisanal culture — that the future of shopping is all about the past.

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Things You Never Knew Existed® is a division of The Johnson Smith Company®, one of America’s oldest catalogs companies. In 1905, our founder, Alfred Johnson Smith, started selling his novelties and practical jokes in Australia. The company was officially founded in the U.S.A. in 1914, when Mr. Smith shipped his first package from Chicago.

From Wikipedia:

The Johnson Smith Company is a mail-order company officially established in 1914 by Alfred Johnson Smith in Chicago, Illinois, USA (but originally began in 1905 in Australia) that sells novelty and gag gift items such as x-ray goggles, whoopee cushions, fake vomit, and joy buzzers. The company moved to Bradenton, Florida in 1986 after having been in the Detroit, Michigan area since 1935 (and Racine, Wisconsin before that).

The company would normally put ads in magazines devoted to children and young adults such as Popular Mechanics and Science Digest. Their ads appeared on the back cover of many historically significant comic books, including Action Comics #1, June 1938 (first appearance of Superman) and Detective Comics #27, May 1939 (first appearance of Batman).

In 2004, the company marked its 90th anniversary.

Johnson Smith Timeline:

1885 – Alfred Johnson Smith is born in Halifax, Yorkshire, England.
…
1971-1985 – Things You Never Knew Existed slogan is coined to describe the Johnson Smith Catalog.

1997 – E-commerce sites are launched for Things You Never Knew Existed (formerly known as the Johnson Smith Catalog) and The Lighter Side.
…

Toy Shopping Should be FUN!

If you think shopping in a toy store isn’t fun for kids of all ages, you haven’t been to Figpickels! Thousands of visitors from all over the United States & Canada have rediscovered the joy of feeling like a kid again? while exploring Figpickels Toy Emporium. From our combination of hands-on displays, unique and retro toys and great executive gifts to our working German carousel and award-winning customer service, our family owned and operated emporium has become the premier toy store in the Northwest. Now, we are bringing this same quality & service to our e-customers. Almost every toy is hand picked and tested to make sure it meets our high standards for safety, quality, education, value and most of all? FUN!

Remember when shopping meant a friendly smile, time enough to chat awhile?? At Figpickels we remember!

Figpickel’s Toy Emporium’s web store is hosted by Yahoo! Store. Read the rest of this entry »

Okay, this doesn’t have anything to do with Jennifer Garner, but if you are a fan you have definitely seen Juno, and if you have seen Juno, you definitely want a phone like Juno (Ellen Page) herself.

Teenage pregnancy is no laughing matter, but this is:

The hamburger phone used by Juno to tell Olivia Thrilby that she was “for shizz up the spazz” is finally available online.

Now you too can place your head between the bun, and the cheese-topped patty to talk away. Let’s hope not for the same reason as Juno.

The Juno Hamburger Phone - Just like the one used in Juno. Jason Reitman’s “Juno” is just about the best movie of the year. It is very smart, very funny and very touching; it begins with the pacing of a screwball comedy and ends as a portrait of characters we have come to love.

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Birdhouses made from second-hand books.

Since birds haven’t shown much appreciation for literature, these imaginative birdhouses will do much better decorating the inside of your house than serving as theirs. Designer Dave Vissat stumbled upon this idea when he was making a birdhouse for his mother. He ran out of wood, so he resorted to using an old book as a roof. Then he began incorporating interesting text and illustrations as well.

Now, Vissat searches and scavenges flea markets and libraries for discarded and vintage books, then he scans the cover, makes a print and affixes it to the exterior of the house.

These ornamental wooden houses use books and imagery from classical and popular literature to capture a past era in American culture. The classic classic To Kill A Mockingbird house, features a twig perch, Gregory Peck movie poster and excerpts of the story as siding. Made in Pennsylvania.

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