The Trouble With Wax

The Fourth Chapter

How Minimum Textiles Seasons Work

Minimum Textiles vs. Killstar: What Is the Difference?

On packaging, growing pains, and the systematic extermination of interesting things. Cover photo taken literally moments (precisely 7 moments, actually) before the little blue warmer to my right became a bright disaster. On the left, note the plastic ice block used to cool the stamp. This saves 25 seconds per order. 

Today, an eight-dollar wax warmer decided to retire.

It did so rather dramatically, melting its own electrical cord and producing a medium sized, crackling, enthusiastic shower of sparks across my warehouse floor. I burned my finger attempting to turn it off, unplugged the whole mess from the wall, and spent the next few minutes examining what remained of the appliance.

The warmer was Chinese, inexpensive, and had apparently been leaking wax for some time. I suspect the wax had accumulated beneath the heating element, although I can't say for certain. It had performed its duties admirably until the moment it didn't, which I suppose is true of most cheap electrical equipment.

I threw it away. Finished packing orders in the semi dark, semi silence. Finger hurting. I'm home now crushing a few Michelob ultras to dull the pain and looking forward to playing some Deadlock.

This would ordinarily be the end of a story about an eight-dollar appliance, except that the little bastard has left me with an administrative problem.

I have several hundred orders to ship, and no particular desire to purchase another wax warmer.

For the uninitiated, every order from Minimum has traditionally included a letter sealed with wax. This was something I started doing when the company was very small, largely because I liked the idea of it. There's something wonderfully pretentious about sealing correspondence with an embossed sigil in the twenty-first century, particularly when the correspondence in question is accompanying a sweatshirt.

The seal itself serves no practical purpose. It's decorative, fragile, and requires a surprising amount of manual labor to produce. Customers seem to like it. I like it. Nobody particularly needs it.

Which is precisely why I'm reluctant to get rid of it. The problem, as with most things in life, is arithmetic.

When you're shipping thirty orders, making thirty wax seals is a pleasant enough way to spend an afternoon. You melt some wax, pour it over an envelope, press a little metal stamp into the resulting puddle, and wait for the whole affair to solidify. Repeat thirty times. Go home. Have a drink.

When you're shipping three hundred orders, the charm begins to wear thin. At a thousand, I imagine it starts to resemble a particularly tedious form of medieval punishment. And Minimum, somewhat inconveniently, continues to grow.

I have already sacrificed the handwritten letters. In the beginning, I wrote a personal note to accompany every order. This was a lovely idea when I had twenty customers. At a few hundred, it became increasingly difficult to convince myself that spending an entire day writing variations of the same thank-you note was a productive use of my time.

The letters are now printed. Nobody complained. The sun continued to rise. Minimum survived. But I was a little disappointed.

There is an unfortunate tendency in business to celebrate the elimination of anything that requires effort. Time is money, processes must be streamlined, labor must be reduced, and every little inconvenience must eventually be dragged behind the woodshed and shot.

Much of this is perfectly reasonable. I'm not interested in running a clothing company like a nineteenth-century monastery, despite what the imagery might suggest. I have orders to ship, customers to satisfy, and an increasingly unreasonable number of cardboard boxes occupying my warehouse.

But I'm beginning to wonder whether efficiency is always the virtue it's made out to be. I have very little affection for efficient things.

An efficient restaurant serves you something perfectly acceptable in a room designed to offend nobody. An efficient hotel provides a bed, a shower, and furniture apparently selected by a committee of insurance adjusters. An efficient clothing company produces garments that look reasonably fashionable, packages them in the cheapest available plastic, and sends them on their way. All perfectly functional. All perfectly forgettable.

The things I tend to remember are the ones that make no particular effort to justify themselves. The strange little restaurant with twenty seats and an owner who refuses to change the menu. The bar with an enormous, hideous painting that has presumably been hanging there since the Carter administration. The shopkeeper who insists on wrapping every purchase in brown paper and string, despite the availability of considerably more practical alternatives.

I remember visiting a restaurant in Busan, South Korea when I was in training to be an English teacher. I walked down the street and saw a restaurant on a side alley that was entirely black. I mean, shockingly, laboriously black. Black walls, black shutters, blacked out windows, little black flowers in black window pots. I walked in. The entire interior was black. Black floors, black walls, black ceiling, black tables, black chairs, black salt and pepper shakers on the black table cloths. I sat down and was served water in a black cup. I looked at the black menu, picked something, I think it was japchae but my Korean was horrendous so it could have been anything. A black plate came out. Black noodles in black sauce, black (purple) rice, a blackened egg. A commitment to the bit that was utterly fanatical. Of all restaurants I've ever eaten at, this one, that I don't even remember the name, stands paramount. I can't even remember how the food tasted. Fine, I think. 

These are not sensible people. I like them enormously. I think a great deal of what makes Minimum interesting belongs to this category of unnecessary indulgence.

The elaborate illustrations, the strange symbolism, the occasionally ridiculous garment construction. The little bits of invented history and mythology. The names that sound like they were pulled from a particularly unpleasant religious text.

None of it is required to sell clothing. I could make an ordinary black hoodie, print a small logo on the chest, and send it out in a plastic bag. It would be cheaper to manufacture and considerably easier to explain.

I would also find the whole enterprise intolerably dull. The wax seals, in their own rather insignificant way, belong to the same family of ideas.

I like the thought of someone opening a package from Minimum and finding a letter that looks as though it was stolen from the desk of a disfellowshipped bishop. It's a stupid little detail, but a pleasing one. It suggests that somebody involved in the process cared enough to do something entirely unnecessary.

The trouble is that caring doesn't make the wax cool any faster. Every seal requires heating, pouring, stamping, cooling, and handling. The actual cost of the wax is negligible. The time involved is not.

And while I'd like to believe that every customer spends several minutes admiring the craftsmanship of their embossed correspondence, I suspect a fair number of them tear the envelope open, read the letter, and throw the whole thing into the trash.

I can't blame them. I do the same thing with most of my mail. This raises a question I find increasingly difficult to answer: how much of the experience is worth preserving when the experience itself begins to interfere with delivering the product?

I don't know.

I am not especially interested in asking customers to wait an extra week for their order because I've developed an unhealthy attachment to decorative stationery. People want the mother fucking hoodie, they don't want me frittering around with ephemera in a warehouse after hours. 

On the other hand, if I remove every little detail that slows me down, I worry that I'll eventually find myself running the same sort of business I started Minimum to avoid. The wax seals are only one small part of that concern.

First the handwritten notes. Then the seals. Eventually, perhaps, the unusual packaging, the elaborate inserts, the peculiar little flourishes that make the whole thing feel less like a transaction and more like receiving something from a place that doesn't quite exist.

Each individual concession is reasonable. Collectively, they begin to look suspiciously like surrender.

I suppose this is one of the less glamorous aspects of growing a business. There is no shortage of people willing to tell you how to scale a company. Far fewer have anything useful to say about how to keep it from becoming boring in the process.

For now, the wax seals are suspended.

The remaining orders from this release will ship without them. In January, I'll be moving into a new warehouse and, mercifully, hiring someone to help with fulfillment. At that point, I intend to revisit the operation.

There are options. A larger, properly constructed wax melter would eliminate the need to constantly refill the miserable little appliance that attempted to assassinate my afternoon. Making the seals in batches, rather than individually during packing, might solve the cooling problem. It's possible to produce them separately and attach them afterward. My brother, a genius aerospace engineer, can be shanghai'd into creating some bespoke electromagnetic cooling plate for the seal. He's a secret weapon in that way.

I may also reserve them for certain releases, or the first hundred orders, or some other arbitrary distinction that allows me to retain the practice without turning it into a full-time occupation.

I'm not particularly fond of that last idea. There's something a little distasteful about turning an ordinary courtesy into a reward for purchasing quickly enough. But perhaps I'm being sentimental.

I've always found it irritating that the most extravagant packaging in the world seems to be reserved for people who haven't paid for what's inside When they received their secret gifts and purchases they came enclosed in statues and trunks, gilded with handwritten notes, enclosed in linen bags and arrayed in tasteful piles on silk sheets to display for instagram audiences with letters instead of digits. I wanted, in some way, to democratize that. To make it the most absurdly cheap thing you could buy with the most absurdly expensive fanfare. I spend 8 damn dollars a package on ephemera. It's a chunk. 

Maybe the seals aren't particularly important. Maybe people remember the clothes and forget the packaging. Maybe the whole exercise has been an elaborate way of amusing myself at the expense of several hundred hours of labor. That would hardly be the first time. 

I don't want Minimum to remain small. Quite the opposite; I would like it to become a very large company, one capable of making increasingly strange and ambitious things. I'd like the sort of resources that allow you to pursue an idea simply because it's interesting, without having to worry quite so much about whether it's practical.

But I have no interest in arriving at that point only to discover that I've spent the intervening years systematically removing everything that gave the company its personality.

There ought to be room for a little absurdity. A little inconvenience. A few things that serve no greater purpose than making the world slightly more interesting. I would prefer not to lose those things simply because I've become better at counting the minutes.

In the meantime, the letters will go out unsealed. Nobody will suffer. The customers will receive their clothes, the post office will continue its mysterious, labyrinthine and oft Hadean work, and I will have one fewer appliance to worry about.

In January, I'll see about bringing the seals back.

Preferably without the fireworks.