The Pen Addict 279/transcript

The Pen Addict Podcast Transcript
Episode:	279
Title:	Live at Field Notes HQ
Release Date:	October 18th, 2017
Hosts:	Brad Dowdy Myke Hurley
Guests:	Jim Coudal
Additional Information
Official page:	Episode 279
Audio File:	Audio Episode 279
Podcast page:	The Pen Addict 279
Length:	6767 min <br />1.117 h <br /> minutes
Previous Transcript	Next Transcript

Pen Addict Podcast

Myke Hurley: From RelayFM, this is The Pen Addict, episode 279. Today's show is brought to you by Squarespace. My name is Myke Hurley and I'm joined on location by Mr. Brad Dowdy. Hi Brad Dowdy.

Brad Dowdy: Good to see you again, Mr. Hurley. For the third time. Yeah, third time this year. We have made it together and this last one was made possible by our good friends at Field Notes, Mr. Jim Kudal and Mr. Brian Bedell.

Myke Hurley: So thank you guys for having us. You're welcome. And thank you so much for being on the show today. We are really excited. I think this has been, this isn't happening, but if The Pen Addict was to end, this would be a good episode to end it on. Wow. I'm just saying, like it just popped into my head. It's like this feels like we could have ended a journey and done it here together today.

Jim Coudal: And then maybe I could do like a poetic elegy to the show that was. Yeah. But that's not happening. Let's do it. Let's burn it down. Brian could write the practical applications for Brad's firing. Yeah.

Myke Hurley: And like for what Brad can go on to do next. Many practical things that you can go on to do. Yeah. But we're not doing that, but we are, we do have a very special episode today because we are joined. I think this is the second time that we've had Jim and Brian on the show, right? We had you on quite a while ago.

Brad Dowdy: We had Brian on solo once. Yeah.

Myke Hurley: And I think I was on. You've been on once as well. Once as well. Very early. And then we had you both on together. Yep. Yep. Yep. But just through kind of luck and chance, this is, this episode, us being here with you has coincided with Field Notes' 10th anniversary, which is, when is the exact date? Well, that's a matter of some debate.

Brian Bedell: You might have noticed that before we did, actually.

Jim Coudal: Yeah. We, I think that we are pretty darn certain that the 10th, October 20th or so, right about now, 23rd, is when, was the first time anyone could buy a three-pack of Field Notes from, from FieldNotesBrand.com. And so we figure that's as good a marker as any. There were some Field Notes that existed before it and some other things, but, so somewhere late October.

Myke Hurley: And at that point, it was just craft.

Jim Coudal: And just graph. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That was the first run of what is now recognized as the Field Notes, the, the iconic Field Notes is, was about, I think, 500 three-packs, so 1,500 books. It was printed in Portland. They were all graph paper. And then we've done a few editions since then.

Myke Hurley: So when, when this happened, so 10 years ago, what was the idea? What was the plan? Like, why was this happening?

Field Notes Origins

Jim Coudal: Well, there wasn't a plan. And then.

Brian Bedell: Oh, as I say, we didn't want to do advertising anymore. That's pretty much why it happened. Yeah.

Jim Coudal: We were working for clients and had run a couple of other businesses, which we don't have to get into here, that were moderately to very successful. And long story short, Aaron, our partner in this, Aaron Draplin from Portland, sent, made up some Field Notes-y sort of things and sent them out. And we thought they were cool. And we said, Aaron, let's make a company. And he said, okay. And we started selling them. And we sold, I think, 13. We made 13 sales on the very first day that they were available on the website. From nothing.

Myke Hurley: That's pretty good, though. Yeah.

Jim Coudal: Although, we were joking before the show that somebody had mentioned something about our blog at kudal.com. And, of course, this is pre-Twitter and pre-Facebook and pre-Instagram. And so blogs had a little more swing at the time. And Aaron was pretty well followed as well. So when we said, here's this new thing we're doing, it kind of went around. And so, but I think that is about four or five years ago when we realized that this thing was becoming bigger than, we didn't really plan for anything.

Brian Bedell: Right. Yeah, we never, I mean, I think all of the little businesses we started along the way there, we hoped they would, you know, take over and be great. But we never really planned on it or expected them to. So this is sort of the one that stuck and we grew with it. And it's worked out pretty well. Yeah.

Brad Dowdy: Yeah. So Brian told me before the show that he's actually worked with Jim for 20 years. Very close. Yeah. Very close to 20 years. So that's, you know, their work together goes back a long ways before Field Notes. So it's interesting to me to see all the different businesses y'all have tried and they were all successful in their own right. In one way or another. In one way or another. Yeah. And what was different about this one you think that made this one stick? Right. I mean, you just said it took you almost four or five years to even realize that this was really going to be a thing that's going to go forward.

Jim Coudal: Well, first and foremost, they were selling. So there was that and there was growth and people were stores were taking them. And there's we can tell stories about the moments in the history of Field Notes that sort of made a big difference. For example, I don't remember what year it was, but J.Crew, for the first time in their history, instituted a program called In Good Company. And it was the first time ever in their catalog or their stores that they sold non-J.Crew goods. And they partnered with some American brands, including Levi's and Timex and Wolverine Shoes and out of nowhere, Field Notes. And so and then they opened the liquor store in Brooklyn or Soho, I guess it is. And they stocked us in there and they put us in their catalogs. And we didn't sell a huge amount through J.Crew, but it really gave us credibility. Yeah. That J.Crew all of a sudden had decided to choose us among all the brands in America for six or eight brands they were going to partner with. So that made a big difference. That impacted how other retailers felt about us. They said, well, if J.Crew is carrying this. And J.Crew, maybe today, the brand doesn't have the cachet it had. Eight years ago, maybe it does. But that was a moment. So they were like, oh, whoa, maybe there's something here. Like, so that I think actually from a personal satisfaction standpoint, too. I mean, we do these additions and we get to have a whole new project four times a year. Yeah.

Brian Bedell: Absolutely, yeah. We had, you know, from doing client work that sort of, you know, it was all good work and we liked doing it. But to work on something for ourselves, for our own satisfaction, really made a big difference. And our original blog audience was mostly designers and web nerds and stuff. So really the product spoke to them. And that was just a great audience to pitch it to right away. And, of course, it spread from that. And, you know, just the appeal of a notebook pretty much appeals to anyone. We've got people all walks of life, all ages and everything using them. So, you know, we had that nice starting point to kind of get our foot in the door.

Myke Hurley: So you mentioned the J.Crew thing. And I assume in the history of Field Notes, that's probably one of the most surprising things that has happened.

Jim Coudal: Yeah, I'd say.

Myke Hurley: What other things over the history have happened with the company that you maybe wouldn't have expected?

Jim Coudal: Well, the biggest one is that people collect them. We had never had a plan that we're going to like, oh, good, we're going to sell these to a majority of the population. But let's isolate about 10,000 people who are crazy for them and need every edition. So I guess we could have predicted it when we started doing the limited editions, but we didn't. But I think Michelle here got an email from Italy once. This was pretty early. And it said, oh, I need a copy of that Fire Spotter because I'm a completist. And she showed the email to us and we're all like, well, what does that mean? Little did we know it wasn't just one guy in Italy who was trying to get all the editions. So that, I think, was a surprise to us.

Brian Bedell: I remember writing the original website copy for subscriptions and saying you get one three-pack to use and one to put in a PVC sleeve and keep for posterity. And I totally was joking when I wrote that. And I think a lot of people took it seriously.

Brad Dowdy: It was subliminal messaging. Yeah. Like I wouldn't even thought that at the time. I mean, I guess in retrospect.

Brian Bedell: I mean, the proof is we don't have anything from the early years.

Jim Coudal: If we had been calculating, we would have put some aside, but we didn't. So yeah, that was a pretty big surprise, I think.

Jim Coudal: I think the attachment that people outside of the collectors find to the analog process of keeping a notebook with them surprised us in how important it is to some people. Mm-hmm. And it was satisfying as well. Because we're trying to make a practical notebook. We're trying to, you know, the collecting aside, we're trying to make a notebook that's inexpensive, well-made, well-designed, and practical. And you can write milk, butter, vodka, eggs, or you can write an ode to the Spanish Steps in Rome. You can either, it doesn't matter. You don't need to be Van Gogh to use the field notes, you know, or Rimbaud or somebody.

Brad Dowdy: And I think that's important because over 10 years that hasn't changed no matter what, at least from the outside perspective. And I'm sure, I'm assuming you guys feel that way, from the very first edition to the most current edition, they're the most just usable notebook. This is a notebook you buy to be used. And that's never changed from edition one to the most current release, I think.

Brian Bedell: Well, since, I mean, since notebooks were invented, I was just earlier looking. We've got a Selectric over there and an Atari XT. And, you know, I was thinking that's sort of like a little history of taking notes. But, I mean, I was also thinking you could have that, you know, field notes, you know, you'd be using a notebook along with your computer, along with your typewriter, along with your, you know, whatever system of reproduction you're using or whatever kind of technology you have, a notebook goes along with it. So, yeah, we didn't, you know, we didn't invent it and they're not going anywhere. So, we have that working for us.

Jim Coudal: We, there's, so to your question, Brad, a phrase that gets thrown around here a lot about any idea or execution is, is it field notesy enough? And what, we don't really know what that means, but we sort of know it when we see it. Like, is it, does it fall within this idea of a authentic heritage brand? Does it have a voice that makes it feel like it's part of the field notes family? Can, is that too clever of a headline or is that too overproduced of a documentary? So, I guess that sort of speaks to trying to maintain the voice of the brand in the marketing as well as in the product design.

Brian Bedell: Yeah, and that goes back to the original project. I mean, the original product, Aaron had such a clear vision of what they should be. He, as you know, he collects the old farm books and everything and sort of distilled that to its most essential basic standard, but then also cluttered the hell out of it and put a bunch of silly copy on there. So, you know, going back to that original product is our template for everything we've done since. And, you know, we base, we base all the text we write and all the, you know, the design and everything we do is based around that original product. And it makes it fun, actually, because it restricts some of the things we can do and makes you think about other things.

Jim Coudal: Yeah, constraints are how good creative gets made.

Myke Hurley: So, we asked for questions from our listeners and we had so many great ones and we picked out a few. And one comes from Anna and Anna asks, if you were starting Field Notes today with the market retail and stationery being exactly how it is right now, do you think it would be harder or easier for the company to have succeeded?

Brian Bedell: I'd say harder for sure. There's more competition.

Brian Bedell: There's, I mean, we're, I think, like I said, with our original blog audience, we kind of had our foot in the door with a certain crowd of people. And, you know, we might still have that now, but maybe not. I don't know. There's, it's hard to say.

Jim Coudal: Another way to look at that is that when we started it, we didn't need it to succeed. Yeah. We were working for clients. We were running the deck and online advertising network. We were doing another company called The Show where we were recording concerts and selling mixes of live performances to people. So, we didn't need it to succeed. And to be quite frank, for the first couple of years, we worked on it, but we worked on a lot of other stuff too. And I think if the question is, would it be harder to get to where you are now? It would be scarier because it would be do or die, whereas we kind of could sort of gradually get into the business in a way. I don't know if it would be harder or easier.

Brian Bedell: We were kind of doing it for fun all along in a lot of ways. Yeah, maybe that's it. If we hadn't done it that way, it probably wouldn't have succeeded if we didn't put ourselves into it and do what we wanted to do. And if we didn't have that luxury to experiment and have fun with it, I don't think it would have done as well.

Jim Coudal: Yeah, I don't think we ever had intentions of being notebook kings. Sure. Like, we didn't know what we wanted. I didn't know I was going to be a notebook guy. And the notebook is the middle of the company and it's the essential part of the company. But it is also the vehicle that allows us to make films that we like and to write copy that we like and to use printing techniques that we like and to edit code that we like and to do. Like, so it's sort of that is the means by which we can use the talents that we've developed working for other people on behalf of ourselves. And I think that's where the fun is. Yeah, absolutely. And learning new things. I mean, we could talk about that for the rest of the hour. Yeah, sure.

Myke Hurley: I mean, so I think one of the things that is undeniable about Field Notes today is that there is a large community of people that focuses on the company quite heavily. You know, people want to know what you're up to. People are very keen to find out the new additions, whether just because they're excited or because they're going to be going into a safe somewhere. You know, like for whatever reason it is. Do you do anything to try and manage the community's expectations? Is this something that comes into your mind at any point when you're maybe thinking about some of the products that you want to make, maybe the way that you want to market and hype the product? Like interacting with people that love the products? Like what goes into this from your perspective?

Jim Coudal: It would be disingenuous to say that we don't. When we read the online communities and we get tons of emails and we meet people here. And so, yes, the people who are most devoted to our products, their opinions are important to us. And yet, at the same time, on a percentage of the number of products we sell to the world, that's a relatively small sliver of the audience. But there are evangelists and there are best customers. So, we do, I don't think we do much to manage expectations. If anything else, I think we sometimes over-promise. And then, and that's, I will say, I'm guilty for that. It's not really. I don't know. What do you think?

Brian Bedell: I don't know. I don't think we might.

Jim Coudal: Over-promise is too strong, maybe.

Production Process

Brian Bedell: Yeah, we don't over-promise. We might over-promise, but we don't under-deliver. I think they're usually good. Nice one. That's fair. Over-promise, over-deliver. We do, there's a lot, it's hard to not navel-gaze and do what we want to do for ourselves. And usually, that works out for us. You know, we can keep it mixed up and do different things. But we do have to remember, especially with subscribers, they need to, you know, it needs to work for anyone. It needs to have universal appeal, really. So, we get a lot of requests for very specific things, and we try to keep real general and mix things up just so there's a big variety. And subscribers are at least getting, you know, three of the four they get in the year, something they get really excited about, and the other one they can gift. You know, we're never going to get everyone happy with every edition. And that bothered us for a while, and then we got over that pretty fast because we realized no matter what we do, people are getting a few containers.

Jim Coudal: This is kind of weird, but the thing that got us over worrying too much about the public reaction, the vocal public reaction to a particular product was actually America the Beautiful, which is one of our favorite editions. And we could talk about that for a long time because there's a lot of really interesting production details on that one. But when we made it, Aaron and Brian and I, and I think everybody here, were so excited that we had really hit the vibe of vintage farm co-op notebooks and the printing process. And when they were launched, they were launched to silence. People didn't know what to do about it because they had never seen an image on the cover of a field notes. They didn't know what to do with it. And we were a little bit, we felt a little bad about that. But then they got mailed out. And over time, and actually a pretty long period of time, they've become one of the most beloved editions that we've ever done.

Myke Hurley: It was very ambitious, like in every respect, right? That was when the paper got thicker too, right? Yeah. With America the Beautiful. Like there were a lot of things going on with that edition. Yes, there was. But it was so dramatically different.

Jim Coudal: But it wasn't such a step away from, for example, National Crop in terms of its focus and its vibe. So I think in a way we decided at that point, or it didn't decide anything, but we started to feel like, you know, if Aaron and Brian and Jim and Matt and Steve feel, and Michelle and everyone, Eric, everybody feels something about that, then we're doing the right thing. And then let's let the product work for itself. So to go back to the original question, we want to make products that people love, but we also want to challenge them a little bit in the way that we challenge ourselves to do something different and yet still be field notes-y.

Myke Hurley: So on that then, Dime Novel, the most recent edition, is another really drastic departure. Yeah. I think maybe in a similar way, like America the Beautiful, because it's a totally different form factor and it looks different and the pages are numbered. But how has the reaction to this one been compared to something like America the Beautiful?

Jim Coudal: I think we could talk about this in two different ways. First of all, the original reaction was pretty positive about it because it looks pretty sexy in photos and we did an okay job of describing it. But when people started to get them, then the reaction really was good because it's a very tactile edition. There's a lot of small details that you really can't communicate in photography. But I think Dime Novel is a really good example to talk about what we're trying to do at Field Notes. And there's sort of two parts of it. That's where the idea comes from and how it gets translated into a product, especially in regards to production techniques when we're trying to, maybe we'll start there, production techniques we're trying to replicate a process from the past. I mean, a very quick story is where it all came about is I fell down a rabbit hole about these dime novels. I don't know how I ever found it. And I started reading about it and I found a mother load of information. And the story of these two brothers in New York City and the birth basically of the mass market American paperback and genre novel was completely new to me. And I consider myself a nerd about American publishing and design history. And immediately I'm like, Brian, have you ever heard of these things? And Brian's like, no, I never heard this story at all. And we called Aaron. I go, Aaron, surely you know about the dime novels from New York, the orange covers. He's like, no, I never heard about that. And we're like, at that moment, we're like, well, we have to tell the story. Because if us three don't know what it is, not that we're doing it, but if we don't know what it is, then a lot of people don't know what it is. And so we did more and more research and we actually bought one from 1860. And then that presented this whole other thing is how do we translate something from 1860 to 2017 in terms of production and also to a brand whose inspiration is the 1920s? So like the dime novels were 60 years before the farm books that are the basis of the inspiration. And for all of Field Notes, so maybe Brian, you could talk about that. 80 years before Futura. You're talking about our honest appropriation.

Brian Bedell: We are really interested in how production and how the technology affected the design of a certain time. And I've always been super interested in that. I bore people with this on tours all the time. But if you look at someone designing, say, a 60s poster, they'll look at the superficial aspects of what was done then, the sort of psychedelic type and the colors and maybe do that and copy it. But people don't realize that those decisions were made because they needed to be screen printed in relatively small quantities but distributed. A lot of the type was actually typewriter type stuck on there. And then the display type would have been hand-drawn mostly. But no one ever designing a 60s-looking poster is going to hand-draw a psychedelic type. They're going to use Hobo or some stupid, totally inappropriate typeface to kind of copy that style. So, and I guess, like, going to other, you know, in industrial design, too, I'm into Vespa scooters. And in the last 15 years, there's been 100 retro-looking scooters that came out. And they just have these stupid chrome plastic, you know, scoops and grills and stuff on them that don't do anything. And if you look back at original scooters from the 50s and 60s, you know, those had a purpose and it was very carefully designed to be this perfect form of, or mix of form and function. And these modern ones are just an engine with this plastic body stuck over it with stuff stuck to it to make it look like it's from the 60s. So that's been a big driving force for the design is looking at the production of the time, not doing anything we couldn't do. You know, we might not be able to do it exactly the same way, but we don't want to have, you know, overlapping type or, you know, just crazy things that, you know, you can do on a computer so easily now that were impossible back then.

Jim Coudal: So that's, that keeps us honest.

Brian Bedell: And I think even looking at the dime novel, like we were so surprised to see how, how small the type was, how crowded it was, how much they were able to do with the technology of the time. It blew our mind really. Yeah. Still does. Yeah.

Jim Coudal: But to go to his point, I think this is that we make an honest effort to reproduce the technological limitations that resulted in the original thing. Like, and this is a really interesting example in dime novel is that the original dime novels and they did millions of them were all set by hand with metal type and they were printed on letterpress. And if you look at them, the ink would hit the page with the metal type and make a bit of an impression. Now, ideally we would have printed our dime novel edition on a letterpress, but we didn't have a year and a half to do it. Like, you know, because we make so many of them and that we had just had the idea six weeks before we needed to, or eight weeks before we had to put the whole thing together. So what's the honest way to do that is either you don't put an impression and you just print on it. Or what we did, which is ridiculously complicated, is that we printed the pages at one printer. Then we took the pages to another printer and hit them with a die to make an impression the same as the type so that the final thing would look like it had been printed with a letterpress. And so it's not, we're not cheating. We're actually going out of our way to take an extra step to try to reproduce the effect.

Brian Bedell: Actually, like you were saying, it's sort of a mistake. Well, right, right. Originally, you see any letterpress printing now really milks that impression just to make it clear that it's letterpress. But back then that was sort of, you would do everything you would do to avoid that. Right. Especially with the dime novels, they're printed on pretty cheap paper. So it wasn't very soft paper. And there's not much of an impression there. But as long as we were, as long as we could go through all that trouble, we've had to make it count.

Jim Coudal: So anyway, and that is the final dime novel thing, or maybe not, we could talk about dime novel for the rest of the hour too, is that the reason that they existed was in fact a technological change. Up until about 1830 or 40, there was a couple of ways to make a lot of something in printing. One was a newspaper. They would make a lot of newspapers in the day. And that was a big, huge press that was specifically for making newspapers. The other was hardcover books. Those took a long time to print. You put them together. So this guy Adams invented this thing called the power press, which was still pretty big, as big as a car. But at least you could print a bunch of copies quickly. And there is no dime novels from the Beatles brothers in 1860 if there is no Adams power press, because there was no way to do it. So it's sort of interesting. This technological moment made this beautiful piece of consumer design. And so for us, all of this ephemera around it, this is what we love the most, is that we learned all this stuff that we didn't know before we started this project. And hopefully that comes through in our marketing materials and in the documentary film we make and everything else.

Brian Bedell: Sorry, to go back to the reaction to it, we had blank pages, which we haven't done that many times with the limited editions. But I think back to America the Beautiful, that was the first ruled we did. We had done .graph before that, but most of them were either .graph or .graph. And people were super angry, like, why is this ruled? It's a subscription. I demand my graph paper. And we were like, we never said that. That was your idea of what you were going to get. And sorry, if you don't like it, we've always kind of joked, like, if you don't want it, send it back and we'll send you some graph paper ones. And no one ever follows us up on that.

Brian Bedell: But that was the same thing with this one. It was blank pages. And people were like, what am I going to do with blank pages? It's like, well, you could do just about anything with them. And if not, there are just as many people that are angry that if they would have had graph pages, we can't please everybody with every edition.

Brad Dowdy: That leads right into my question about the dime novel, is when you hear your story, and what goes into it, and then you see the video, it's almost, it's like, how can you even say anything about, okay, the format's not three and a half by five and a half. Like, those type of, I don't want to call them complaints, but it's a different book. But it's there for a reason. The time and effort you put into it, that kind of eliminates the, oh, well, this isn't my usual field notes that I get.

Jim Coudal: That won't stop people. Well, but we're sort of resolved with that, you know, because arts and sciences was larger for a reason, and the byline was larger for a reason, and this is larger for a reason. But we do know that people like the standard format very much, and so we tend to do that once a year. Yeah, there's three versions of that reading for you. Yeah, like that size, yeah. And there are other issues as well, but once again, in the greater scheme of things, is it field notesy? Does it relate to American design history? Has it been carefully made? You know, like, those are the ones that are the things that are... It's practically a perfect addition for what field notes is in my book.

Brian Bedell: And is it keeping us interested? Yeah.

Myke Hurley: And people are buying it like crazy, so some people must like it. Yep. Yep. All right, let's take a quick break. I want to thank our sponsor for this week, which is Squarespace. You can go to squarespace.com. You can sign up for a trial. And if you use the offer code INC at checkout, you will get 10% of your first purchase. You can make your next move with Squarespace. They let you easily create the website that you have for your next idea or project. Maybe you want to create a website to show off your gallery of field notes. We did that. Do you remember when we did that?

Brad Dowdy: We absolutely did that. Is it still on the web? It is not because I think I stopped updating it. I was somewhere in the 20-something editions. There was a page that kind of had them all in order up until then. I need to put it back up.

Myke Hurley: You should put it back up. Complete it. Go to the Wayback Machine and check it out. It's because it's very easy to do with Squarespace. They have all of the tools that you need. So they're only one platform. If you want to sell stuff, if you want to have a blog, if you want to have a gallery, a portfolio, if you want to set up a site for your business, Squarespace have got it all. You can get a unique domain name. They have award-winning 24-7 customer support. They have award-winning templates. They win lots of awards at Squarespace because their stuff is that good. There's nothing to install. No patches to worry about. No upgrades needed. They have everything built right there. You can just go and take advantage of what you need. Their plans start at just $12 a month. You can sign up for a trial with no credit card required just by going to Squarespace.com. Then when you decide to sign up, use the offer code INK at checkout. You'll get 10% of your first purchase and show your support for this show. We thank Squarespace for their support. Squarespace, make your next move, make your next website. And I guess we should also mention at this point to thank our Kickstarter backers as well.

Kickstarter Backers

Brad Dowdy: Yeah. So this is the reason why we're here is for our Kickstarter backers. They allowed us to do this. We do. We've been doing one project a year where we take the show on the road, if you will. And it started with Atlanta and then three years ago. And then it's kind of grown from there to where we've been able to travel to different places. So I wanted to thank all the Kickstarter backers who allowed us to do this. Yep. It's wonderful. Thank you so much.

Myke Hurley: 10 years, 36 limited editions. I've got to ask this question. Favorites. Brian?

Brian Bedell: 37s at the printer. Don't forget.

Brian Bedell: Always be selling. I usually go to Two Rivers. I think that was my favorite because just the most fun to work with those guys. That was one of the rare ones where we really had a good idea what we were doing very early on. And it took tons and tons of time to do so. We had to plan very far ahead on that one. But getting to go up there several times and work with Aaron and Matthew to typeset the actual forms and working with Jim and Stephanie to sort the paper. It was just such a long, complicated process. And they came out exactly as I'd hoped. They couldn't have looked more like what I had in mind when we started. And I was really happy with them. So that's probably my overall favorite.

Jim Coudal: That's not my favorite, but my favorite part of Two Rivers is that we also raised a bunch of money for the Hamilton Wood Type and Printing Museum in Two Rivers, Wisconsin, which you should all go to see.

Jim Coudal: I changed like the wind. If you ask me now and then ask me tonight, I will definitely have a different answer. But for right now, I'm going to say Ravenswing. And for me, that's because it was pretty early. And that's different than what I told Brian two hours ago that I was going to say. That's true. That's our favorite. I was going to say by line, but I just changed my mind. And that's because we used an interesting duplex paper that we hadn't used. They were all really letter pressed by hand by one guy. And I don't know. I think that signaled a move towards a more ambitious design aesthetic for the brand. Like up until that point, I love Mackinac Autumn and Just Below Zero and all those. But they were generally speaking were French colored paper with ink on them. And they were thematically interesting and packaged in interesting ways. But I think that Ravenswing sort of signaled a leap forward in what a Field Notes Mamo book could be, at least for me.

Myke Hurley: Ravenswing was what?

Jim Coudal: Black on the outtick gray.

Myke Hurley: No, I remember it vividly. It's the first edition I'd ever seen. Eight or nine. Yeah, about the eighth edition. And talking about the power of blogs, it was a Daring Fireball link, I think, if I remember rightly. It was to Ravenswing. And I didn't buy them then, but later on I hunted immensely to get a pack. And I do have a pack. And it's the orange band and the beautiful black. I was going to ask if there was a...

Jim Coudal: It's blind embossed too, right? Yeah.

Brian Bedell: Yeah, yeah. There was some varnish.

Jim Coudal: A little varnish, but no ink on the actual. Can I tell you that way?

Brian Bedell: That's one of my least favorites. Yes. Yes. Dan, Varen, who printed it, used actual pieces of... Now, generally, if you're printing something with letterpress, you would get an entire plate made of the entire side of it and print it. He actually printed it with separate pieces. He had little elements made of each line of type and locked them down on a plate. And the Made in the USA line on the back slipped while he was printing it. He didn't notice it. So Steve and I had to go out to the printer and sort through all 8,000 of them or whatever with a ruler and measure how far it slipped and make a judgment call about whether they were good or not. Wow. So I'll ask you a question on that. That was five hours of my life on a printer. Wow.

Myke Hurley: So it didn't really bother me that much.

Brad Dowdy: That's why we love you, though.

Myke Hurley: This is a question I know the answer to, but why did you do that? Why didn't you just ship them?

Brian Bedell: Well, they were pretty obviously messed up. It was really bad? Well, it was... They moved... That was the problem is there weren't some that were bad and some that were good. They moved ever a tiny bit at a time. So... And then by the time they were cut and sorted and we noticed it, they were all mixed up. So there was sort of a judgment call we had to make where these were good ones and these were bad ones. And I made a little... I remember I made a little template and we'd hold it up over each one. That one's good. That one's bad. And it took hours.

Brad Dowdy: Wow.

Jim Coudal: And there are little tiny things that have happened that we know about that we've never even got an email about. Yeah. That we felt like we could have done that better on this edition. And they... And they bother us till forever.

Brian Bedell: It's like a musician listens to their song and hears every little tiny mess up and no one else will ever hear that. I tell them my daughter is getting really into illustration and drawing. And I look at her drawing, so I'm like, just my mind is blown at how good they are. She's like, oh, that song in the hand looks terrible. No, like, look at this thing. Like, if you could look at this without being the person that made it, you wouldn't believe how great it is.

Jim Coudal: The film we made for Raven's Wing is probably our best piece of printing porn. Because you get to see this old machine going and Dan was so into it and so sincere and talking about how he got into printing. And the saddest part of the whole thing is he's not printing anymore. But which is fine with him. Fine with him, not with us. Yeah, not with us. But if you come back at the end of the show and ask him what our favorites are, I wouldn't be surprised to hear two other stories.

Brad Dowdy: Would Sweet Tooth ever be one of your favorites?

Myke Hurley: You just can't leave it alone. I can't leave it alone. I gotta know. I gotta know.

Brad Dowdy: So I'm in the minority, though. Everyone loves the Sweet Tooth except for me.

Sweet Tooth Origins

Brian Bedell: Sweet Tooth started life as something really different, as a lot of them do. And I'm not going to get into what it was. But I was really happy with it. I thought it came out great. The perforations were pretty neat. We were real worried about that's one of those things. You know, you're going into production with tens of thousands of books. And you don't know if they're going to come off the press and all the pages are going to fall out or people won't be able to hear them. So we did some testing on that as quickly as we could in the time we had. And I think, again, that one came out very close to what we were hoping for. And it certainly has its fans. It's maybe, you know, again, not for everybody. But it's a good one.

Jim Coudal: I have it somewhere around the middle. Yeah. So I don't, you know. But don't ask us which one we like the least because we're not going to tell you.

Brian Bedell: I'll go on the record as saying that it's orange, not red. Oh, here we go. Sweet Tooth. It's not orange. It's red.

Brad Dowdy: Wow. This is one of those, you know, what color is the dress thing. It's exactly that.

Jim Coudal: I can go get one and we can ask everybody what they think and we'll see.

Brad Dowdy: We will do that.

Myke Hurley: We'll do that after the show. We might as well do it. What's your favorite edition, Brad?

Brad Dowdy: It's always been grass stained green. I just love the green. I love the letterpress cover. I love how... Blind embossed with a little varnish.

Brian Bedell: I love how bad it comes through. Well, that was Dan Barron too. And that was one of his first big jobs. And yeah, he was learning just as we were.

Brad Dowdy: Yes. Like it's totally comes through the front of the cover, right? But it looks awesome. And the green graph, that one's always been my favorite. Back to your America, the beautiful. I was on the, I don't know what to do with this when I received it. And over the years, it's probably like, you know, probably like a top five edition. And the other one, my second favorite one is American Tradesman because that cover feels so awesome. Yeah. And that one never gets any love, but that's probably one of my favorite ones.

Myke Hurley: Because it has the... What did you call the... It's like a wavy kind of corrugated. It's like a corrugated.

Brian Bedell: What do they call that? Yeah. I can't remember. And it's a duplex paper too. Yeah.

Brad Dowdy: So those are the grass stained green and American Tradesman are my two favorites. I will say that with...

Jim Coudal: Well, we could just do this all day. But I will say one thing that I really loved was when we could make enough books that we could afford to buy two rolls of enough paper that we could make our own duplex paper. And that would be Shenandoah. Is that we could actually, as we say to people all the time, it's very easy to take a white piece of paper and put green ink on one side and orange ink on the other side. It's a little more problematic, but much more satisfying to take an orange piece of paper and a green piece of paper and bind them together with pressure and adhesives and make them into one piece of paper. And we, Ravenswing and American Tradesman were duplex papers that were made by Nina, I believe. Right. I think they're both Nina. I'm pretty sure. They're both Nina, but they are pre-manufactured as a duplex paper. Whereas at Shenandoah, we got to make our own duplexes. That were your choices. That were your colors.

Brian Bedell: As we've grown, it's harder to do some things, but it's possible to do other things we weren't able to do before. Right.

Jim Coudal: Like we can't do some of the hand work just because the number that we're making is so much, but we can... The number being bigger gives us more flexibility in terms of, I don't know, numbers and bringing the cost per piece down to a way where we can actually do it. And our new pitch black is a custom duplex paper as well. And we actually, in that case, we bought two full rolls, which would really fill up this room, right?

Brian Bedell: Yeah. Yeah. They're pretty big. But yeah, that was the first time. Three tons each. Yeah. We had the other stuff custom laminated, but that was actually ordering from the paper company custom duplex paper, which was a very, very big order of paper. Yeah. Those are great.

Myke Hurley: People love pitch black. I love byline. Love, love byline. But I think if I had to have a favorite, it would be Night Sky, which I have today with me. That edition just blows everything about it. The back, the foil I love and the reticle grid is just, it's like the perfect, it's like the perfect feel. That's very...

Jim Coudal: By far the longest film we've ever made at six hours and 20 minutes.

Brian Bedell: I was going to say that's one of my favorites for sure, both because I did the illustration for the back of the star maps and it took me days to do that. And I learned a lot about constellations. And then Steve and I went out to film that at Great Basin. And just two nights, if you ever get a chance to go out somewhere where there's just no light pollution whatsoever and there's no moon and you can just lie in the ground and look at the stars for two nights in a row. Hours and hours. It does not get boring for a second. It's amazing how much fun that was.

Myke Hurley: So I want to do a quick lightning round. All right. Right? So we can play a bit of word association. It's talking about each of the additions. Just have some very quick questions. Oh, okay. So we'll do this. We'll go Jim, Brian, each one. All right. Hardest to make.

Brad Dowdy: Ambition. The gilding process or the different formats? All of it together. And it came out really well. Yeah.

Brian Bedell: That's second place, but first would definitely be Two Rivers. That was way more complicated. I mean, we knew we planned for it, but that was crazy. It's a lightning round. We can't explain.

Myke Hurley: Simplest to make?

Brad Dowdy: Butcher orange and butcher blue.

Myke Hurley: Yeah. I'd agree with that.

Brad Dowdy: We'll take this paper and this inside.

Myke Hurley: So not necessarily favorite, but in your opinion, the best or boldest design? Boldest design?

Jim Coudal: Dime novel.

Myke Hurley: Okay.

Brian Bedell: Yeah. Maybe America the Beautiful for me.

Jim Coudal: Best paper? Interior best paper for sure. Dime novel. Exterior best paper. Any one of a hundred French books that we've done.

Brian Bedell: Yeah. We love French. That's just obviously our go-to and we kind of almost have to force ourselves not to use them sometimes.

Jim Coudal: Or you could say expedition, which isn't even paper at all. Yeah.

Myke Hurley: That's a wonderful little thing. The best inside print. Like the texture of it? Yeah. Well, the pattern. The grid or the lines or what is your favorite? Or color. Personal?

Steno Notebooks

Jim Coudal: I'm a steno guy. But that's not one of the additions, so I guess that doesn't count. I'll say steno. Traditional. Yeah.

Brian Bedell: I would probably choose ruled over anything else, but I tend to just write all over the place, so it doesn't matter.

Myke Hurley: All right. So this one isn't lightning, but if you could make a change to any addition, one change to any previous addition. One change. Oh my God. What change?

Jim Coudal: I'm not going to say it.

Brian Bedell: I'm not going to say it. You say hi. Jim's is to move over the, move with the logo and center it on traveling salesman. That's right. Oh. I remember. Yep.

Jim Coudal: So let me see if I can think of Brian.

Brian Bedell: Most of mine are secret, and if you say anything, people will notice it and it'll ruin everything. Yeah. The traveling salesman's at least public.

Jim Coudal: I was going to say that I would print twice as many of America the Beautiful. Do people still want that one? Yeah. Yeah. There's a lot of additions we could have printed more.

Myke Hurley: I mean, Night Sky would still sell. We'd be still. Yeah. So a couple of other questions. So Travis asked, how much involvement does Aaron Draplin have in each of the new designs?

Jim Coudal: It varies from design to design. He's involved in all of them. Dime Novel was, once the addition was sort of put together, was three solid weeks of back and forth pretty much every day, swapping designs and ideas. Other times, Aaron gets involved at the beginning with the concept and throws a few cents in. Other times, it's his idea and we execute it. Sometimes it's our idea. He executes it. Sometimes he just does the logo for the button. Sometimes we just do the logo for the button. So it just depends on the addition and timing and everything else.

Brian Bedell: I was just going to say, we always send it to him right at the end, too, to look it over and tighten everything up. But now that I think about it, I don't know if you even saw Winter yet. I don't know if I'm not going to.

Jim Coudal: Whoops. Sorry. That's all right. That's pretty. Yeah, I'm just kidding. We're not talking about Winter. Yeah. So he and the other involvement in him is he gets a lot of feedback about the product because he's on the road all the time and he's seeing people all the time and talking to him. So he gets interesting personal feedback from people about particular editions and things that they want. And that's very important, too.

Myke Hurley: And Gabriel asked, how does the inspiration not dry up? How do you keep coming up with new ideas? Where are they coming from?

Brian Bedell: Well, you don't have any choice. That's part of the beauty. Yeah, the subscription makes us have to do something. And sometimes it's not easy. I mean, we have such a backlog of ideas that we've talked about over the years that we dig into that sometimes if we don't have anything real fresh. But there's just infinite possibilities.

Jim Coudal: The thing is, is that we, I don't think we've ever done one where we have said, well, this will have to be good enough. Yeah. And I think part of it is because we get to a certain point early in the process, or maybe I'm just speaking for me, is that there's this, I get a certain amount of excitement about the beginning of the process and doing the research for the production as well as for the marketing materials that I can sort of feel that I'm on the train, that I feel that way. And I think that we do as a team, so.

Brian Bedell: Yeah, there are a few that I, the original idea wasn't really attractive to me, but once we dug into it, I committed to it. You get, you get committed to it and you start believing in it and it comes together.

Myke Hurley: So, Field Notes super fan, extraordinaire, Ginny from Three Staples asked, what are some of the strangest or most impressive real life uses you have seen of Field Notes?

Jim Coudal: Let me say something about Ginny first though. We were hoping you would. So, she has a Chicago connection by family and she has probably been the most insightful Field Notes reviewer on the web. By far. From the very beginning, I would say. As well as a really talented photographer. And so, we were always asking her when she was going to visit us, and especially since we got the new space, and she kept saying, I don't know, I don't know. And she wrote something online and tweeted something online about our new edition. And then I DM'd her back and I said, well, when are you going to come to Chicago? And the next day, she emailed me and said, we'll be there about one o'clock.

Brian Bedell: But she also, she came in and I answered the door and I was talking to her for about five minutes. And it was clear she knew, I didn't know it was her, and it was clear she knew the backstory. You know, a lot of people that come in do, but she knew our backstory very well. And I was kind of starting to suspect, I didn't know she was coming in. For some reason, I just got in my head, I wonder if this is Ginny. And then eventually she was like, by the way, I'm Ginny. And it was like, she didn't want to tell me, which was so funny. She was so laid back about it.

Myke Hurley: But what is her question? Some of the most impressive or strangest real life uses you've seen at Field Notes.

Jim Coudal: Firefighters. Yeah, a lot of military, firefighter kind of stuff. There's a dedicated couple of fans at McMurdo Base, which is at the North Pole. Right? South Pole. South Pole, at the South Pole.

Myke Hurley: Are they using Standard or are they using Expedition? I think they're using Expedition. Yeah. Because I bet that's the one that gets like the wild stuff. Yeah. We see some pretty crazy stuff. Expedition.

Expedition Editions

Jim Coudal: Spider pilots. Sort of. Should we talk about Ben now? Yeah, yeah. So when we first made Expedition, we were following this British explorer named Ben Saunders. And to become friendly with him online, as one does. And we had supported some of his expeditions. And he was going to go reproduce, redo the Robert Falcon, Scott, and Shackleton expedition on foot. And so we said, well, we'll be involved. We'll make you some notebooks. And we sponsored him for a little bit of sponsorship. And that was where Expedition came from. And interestingly enough, Ben was just here two weeks ago because he's going to become, he's leaving November 19th. He will be the first solo, unsupported trek across Antarctica. To the South Pole from one side, out the other side, 63 days on the ice, all by himself, dragging the sled. No support. No dogs. No food drops or anything. And so we're happy to say that we're going to be supporting him again. So that's a pretty real world. Yeah.

Brian Bedell: Yeah.

Jim Coudal: And, but it's not just that. I like to see, like, you know, a wife leaving notes for her husband in his field. Like, I get the story, like, the guy's at work and he keeps all this mileage in there. And he's traveling a lot of time. He opens the page and there's a cute note from his kid or from his wife because they know he'll be looking at the field notes. So I kind of like the littler things, too. Yeah. Yeah.

Brian Bedell: There's, there's, we find out either accidentally or on purpose from celebrities that use them and that's sort of rewarding. But then you really do just see everyday people using them. That's, I was at Target a few blocks away one time and there was a policeman there, like, who pulled one out to take a note about some product he was looking at. And I was like, oh, stop by the shop sometime. We'll give you some. You know, like, just seeing people. He was like, what? Like, seeing someone using one just walking down the street is more exciting to me than seeing one on TV or something like that. Yeah, that's cool. I like to see them on TV.

Jim Coudal: Yeah, I don't mind that, I guess. Um, then the other ones that always, we have this, I was talking to Myke earlier, on the inside back cover of every field notes, there's a tiny little line that says, take a picture of how you use your field notes and send it to pages at fieldnotesbrand.com. And that's the only place that line exists. We never talk about it on the site. We never say it, except I just said it in this podcast. But we never say it anywhere. And we get tons and tons of them. And, um, and sometimes they're just, you wanted to know. So here it is. These are, I'm rebuilding this Camaro and this is my, you know, thing. Or whatever. But I love to get ones that somebody's using them on a farm. The way that the inspiration books that Weirwitz came for, the way they were using it. So that's sort of, that's cool. That's satisfying.

Brian Bedell: And a lot of just great illustrations you see in them. A lot of illustrators do just carry them around and drawing them. So you see a lot of that on Field Nuts and people's Instagram feeds and things like that.

Atlanta Pen Show

Myke Hurley: Yep. So in April 2016, me and Brad are at the Atlanta Pen Show. And we start getting a bunch of people tweeting at us because there are some weird notebooks beginning to drop in people's letterboxes. And it was a commemorative reprint of Butcher Orange and Butcher Blue. And it was then in 2016 that we said, oh, we have to get you guys on the show again to talk about that. And we've been waiting. And then when we think, we was like, oh, we'll do it, we'll do it. And we wait until now. Because we have no idea how you did that, the way that you did that. So first off, like this was a...

Jim Coudal: That might be my favorite edition, actually.

Myke Hurley: Yeah, that's pretty cool. I guess I've got a couple of questions for this, right? Okay. Why did you do it? And then how did you manage the logistics of one, printing everybody's names, and two, having them drop almost same day in a lot of places around the world?

Brian Bedell: You take the first part, I'll take the second part.

Jim Coudal: I'll take the first part, and I'm going to make it really short. I think I had the idea, and when I presented it to Michelle and Brian, everybody started giggling. And then we said, okay, we have to do it. And if we can do it, we have to do it. But how we actually... And then we were like little kids. We were like, oh, they're going to be so surprised. No one's going to know that it's coming. It was so fun for us. And we're always looking for ways to do a little extra for the subscribers, because subscribers, much like your Kickstarter subscribers, are the ones that really drive the business of Field Notes. So if we can really surprise them with something, and in this case, it was a surprise shipment, which we hadn't really done before. But how exactly we did it, I don't know.

Brian Bedell: Yeah, I mean, as far as printing them was simple. They're the very first ones we did, so there's not much to the actual printing. The belly bands, digital printing's come so far. We're looking at new ways to take advantage of that in the future, because it's getting to a point where it's pretty solid quality. There, even just a few years ago, that we would have never used it for a cover, and now we're looking at doing that for some things. But printing the belly bands was just a matter of mail merging. The subscriber list, weeding out. There were a few ones that were troubled, as far as matching names to real names to people's subscription names and things like that. But Dawson sort of handles all of our logistics and databases and website and things like that. So he had it all pretty organized into... He had it all really organized. Yeah, he's super organized. He keeps this place going. But yeah, I mean, so basically it was a mail merge into a digital printer that would just substitute whatever string for their name. We had to take into consideration... I wish I could remember some of the names, like Otto Klempner, whatever, from Germany, who had four names. We had to kind of go in and cut a couple surnames off of a few people. But in general, that was fairly easy. The trick was, if one gets lost in the mail, what do you do then?

Jim Coudal: But we solved that, too, by having a secondary run.

Brian Bedell: Right. So we knew all along we'd have to do at least one more run a little later. We also knew we were going to sell some more subscriptions based on that, and people would want to get that, too. So I think we ended up doing three printings, and then that got everyone covered other than a few stragglers, which I think we just laser printed a few in the last few. I don't know.

Jim Coudal: Dawson figured out all of the chipping part of it, but it worked, like, perfect. It was unbelievable. People were opening them in Chicago on the same day they were opening them in Berlin. Yeah. And the same day they were opening them in Toronto.

Brad Dowdy: Because our first texts were from Europe. Yeah, because then... I'm in Atlanta.

Myke Hurley: We try to do that every time, and it doesn't usually work that well. It varies. Sometimes I get them the same day as Brad. Sometimes it's a week later. But, like, this one, just something happened. Like, as I sent a text to my fiance, and she's like, yeah, you got them. She opened up and sent me the picture of them. Like, that must have been a really huge undertaking to get all of that stuff to work so perfectly.

Jim Coudal: It was, and those days when we knew they were in the mail and nobody had seen them yet was so much fun. Because it was, like, looming.

Brian Bedell: We knew that it was out there. Part of the beauty of that, too, is that we weren't... There was no announcement date, really. So we had a little... No one was waiting for them, and we weren't really in a hurry to ship them out immediately or anything. So we got to kind of take our time and plan it very carefully. So with a shipment... Not a luxury we have. With an addition, we're like, we got to go, we got to go, we got to go.

Myke Hurley: As soon as they're done, they just go out. It doesn't matter who they're going to will win.

Brian Bedell: Well, we do time. With regular editions, we generally ship Europe a couple days early. Yeah. Or the rest of the world. And then Canada, Mexico a day or two early. And then maybe hold Chicago ones just so people in Chicago aren't getting the same.

Jim Coudal: The funny thing is that people are people. And once they realized that if they bought a subscription, they could still get their own customized commemorative edition. You should have seen some of the names that people put on their accounts.

Brian Bedell: Yeah, I think subscriptions that started with that edition had some pretty weird things.

Jim Coudal: If his name was very rare Field Notes, we didn't go along with that. That was very funny.

Myke Hurley: See, one of the things when we were talking about hype and audience, one of the things that makes the Field Notes edition so interesting is that you keep things close to the chest. How hard is that to do?

Brian Bedell: That's so hard. We've had a few. There have been some attempts to get info before it came out. I remember with the old website was in WordPress and people sort of figured out one issue. People sort of figured out the file structure of that and found pictures of it a day or two before it came out. People just digging around guessing file names. It was the Russians. Yeah, it was the Russians. And we've had all of our printers know what's up with Field Notes so they know what to look out for. If someone's calling like, hey, this is Mark at Field Notes. Can you tell me about people they know to keep it secret? So they're real good about that. They all do other stuff that's very sensitive too. So printers are very careful about not dumping a bunch of stuff in a dumpster or anything like that. So it hasn't been too much of a problem. I mean, it's hard for us to not brag about it because we're always excited about it. And Jim, I guess, Jim, you always put that photo in the mailer. I know. Sometimes it has nothing to do with it and still people guess what it is. Other times it's very clear. And no one gets it. So that's always kind of a crap shoot. But it's kind of funny when a few people guess it. That's obviously that tight group of people. So it's not really going to leak out into the world anyway.

Jim Coudal: Unbelievably, sometimes people out of nowhere with no information at all just guess it exactly. Or they guess the next one. Because people always have a conversation about what would you like to see in the next edition. And sometimes people get it and we're like, oh, that guy is going to be so happy. Yeah.

Brian Bedell: It's a lot of times. Yeah. There's just people guess and speculate so much on there that even a blind squirrel gets in it once in a while.

Jim Coudal: And we can't. Like people suggest additions to us all the time. But we really don't. Can't take those suggestions. We don't encourage them. We don't pay attention to them. Just because we have to do our own thing.

Brian Bedell: And really nine times out of ten it's something we've thought of and we're either going to do or we're sitting on it and thinking of a better way to do it or something.

Special Edition

Jim Coudal: So maybe we might let the cat out of the bag today about something.

Myke Hurley: I feel like if anything's ever going to leak it should be because me and Brad burst into a warehouse somewhere and pulled something off of a shelf.

Jim Coudal: Especially now that it's the last episode of the pen. Yeah. That's right. That's right. It feels like this would be a nice tribute to the show. Sorry, honey. Well, Brian and Aaron have been up to something that has to do with the 10th anniversary. And I'm going to let Brian talk about it. But I will just say anybody who's got an active subscription that's going to receive the winter shipment, which by the way will change your life, will get a special 10th anniversary edition. And then after that, after they're shipped, if there's some left, we hope there will be, we'll offer them for sale on this site as well.

Myke Hurley: We hope there won't be.

Jim Coudal: Yeah, we hope there won't be. We hope they're going to take a subscription. So sign up now. Brian was saying sign up now. So what the edition is, it's actually a pretty complex, considering this thing's only 10 years old or a little bit older for the first iterations, it's been a pretty complicated detective story. But I'm going to let Brian tell it.

Brian Bedell: All right. I'm a forensic designer. If that was a job title, that would be my favorite thing to do in the world. If anyone out there needs a forensic designer, give me a call. But yeah, Aaron is very good about keeping track of his files because he's got the mentality and he's even said this, that someday the Smithsonian is going to want all his archives and he's going to have to have it all organized. He's incredibly organized. Super, yeah. And super modest. And he, but so he had all of these files going all the way back and we were fairly organized here and we had what we needed and we wanted to go back and do a reprint of sort of in the same way that the commemorative reprint was the first two limited editions. We wanted to do some of the first editions pre our collaboration, like some of the weird ones Aaron did. So we're doing three different books going. It's a three pack based on our very early Aaron's very primitive first stabs at a field notes going into some of the ones we worked on together. So, right. So that's our anniversary edition. And they are, that's not the winter edition, by the way.

Jim Coudal: That's not the winter, but they will be shipped. If you have a subscription and you're going to get winter, you will get this in your winter shipment. And I don't think we should let any more of the cat out of the bag. So that's a nice surprise. But I will just say about Aaron being organized is not only does he have the files. He has the files exactly organized where they're supposed to be, but he maintains the modified on date for the file. So that he can say that this file was last modified on July 26, 2006, because then he knows. He's careful. If he has to work with the file, he makes a copy of the file. Wow. It's crazy, right? So he wants to keep all modifications intact.

Brian Bedell: And even, even with that though, this was a crazy, it was super fun going back and looking at how many weird little things that we had done and he had done along the way that some of them never saw the light of day. Some of them, we don't understand where they came from or why we made them. Like there's things we've done so many now. There are some weird ones we've almost forgotten about or can't even place in the timeline. Exactly.

Jim Coudal: It's going to be, it's going to be fun. It's a fun, it's going to be a fun.

Brad Dowdy: It sounds amazing, right? It really sounds amazing.

Myke Hurley: So people, everybody who is currently subscribed will subscribe before winter ships.

Jim Coudal: As long as Dime Novel was not your last, if Dime Novel was your last shipment, you won't get it. If you're getting winter. If you're getting winter, you'll get it. Yep. So if you sign up for a Dime Novel subscription now, you're in. If you renew starting with winter, you're in. If you started with Campfire, you're in. As long as you're going to get a winter shipment, subscription shipment, you will get it. I'm going to check my subscription. While supplies last. While supplies last. And theoretically, if there are, we printed a fair amount of them or we're printing a fair amount of them and there may be some available to buy as three packs, but it's not going to be like a big number. Sure. So the best thing is to subscribe.

Myke Hurley: Oh yeah.

Jim Coudal: Always.

Myke Hurley: Always. That really helps us out.

Jim Coudal: Like Jim said. Yeah. You know, that is like our own little Kickstarter. It just rolls and rolls is that people are putting faith in us and saying, we like the products you're making. We want to see the products you're making in the future. We'll pay now to help you make them. And it gives us a lot of flexibility in terms of economics. It's, you know, we don't have to borrow money from the bank to do an addition. And we also know that there's X number of subscribers out there so we can do a larger run, which makes the cost per piece come down, which lets us to be more ambitious to do things like Dime Novel or Ambition.

Brian Bedell: And I think people don't realize how small we are and we get a lot of emails. Why don't you do all the papers and all the versions and everything? And we just, we are still a very small company and we don't have those resources.

Jim Coudal: What are you doing? The Star Wars edition? Yeah. Or something. Yeah. Why don't you do? Yeah.

Brian Bedell: You should do a Cubs edition. It's like, yeah. Okay. That would be profitable.

Jim Coudal: Yeah. No, it might be, but it wouldn't be field notes. It comes back to the essential question. Is it field notes?

Myke Hurley: Yeah. Do you get brands that want to work with you in that way? Like I know that you do the, do you do your, the special limit? Yeah. I don't know what you called it, but like when you work with someone like XOXO or.

Jim Coudal: I'll sort of explain, there's sort of, I'll explain that. There's sort of two categories. There's a couple of categories. There's a lot of companies do simple customized field notes in which they put their logo on the back of a craft notebook and they hand them out to their employees or they use them at a show or whatever. Then there's what we call customs and collabs. And the basic policy for a custom colorway, like say that you guys wanted to do an orange run is that you have to do, first of all, you have to do a lot of them. Um, and secondly, you have to agree not to sell them. So you, you can give them away at conferences. You can make them a gift with purchase. You can give them to your employees. You can give them however you want, but you can't sell them. But then there's another step up, which involves an even bigger collaboration in which once in a while we will make a deal with another brand to say, let's make an addition together that fits with you and fits with us. And then you buy them from us at wholesale and you can sell them. Like Starbucks. Like Starbucks or LL Bean. Gotcha. Or something. And that's on a buy. Something I would like to say that I can't say right now. And, but, um, Ingersoll watches, for example. So there's been, uh, Nixon watches, for example. We're very careful about the products that Carhartt was like a perfect fit, for example. Yeah. Um, that we make those with and we have very strict guidelines for what you can do to a field notes to make the custom. Um, so yes, but no, people do come to us sometimes and say, oh, why don't you license our intellectual property? And we're not interested in that. I mean, maybe the day will come of the right perfect thing. Yeah.

Myke Hurley: That might be the field notesy thing.

Jim Coudal: I don't know. But in this case, we haven't seen anything that really was interesting.

Brian Bedell: And we get a lot of, a lot of people that just want to print their own notebooks and want us to do it and it doesn't make sense for us to do that. We turned on. Yeah.

Jim Coudal: I mean, you can get, you can order a set of notebooks if you order a thousand of them, which is, it seems like a lot, but it's not that much when you're talking about going on press. Yeah. So, um, and lots of people, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of companies have done that, um, over the course of the last seven years.

Brian Bedell: Yeah. There's anyone who thinks they're completest does not have. There is no one. Yeah. Yeah. That's where it's also getting wild.

Jim Coudal: Yeah. That's where that dream is wild. It's, um, it's to our advantage. Like LL Bean is a very field notesy company if you think about it. And so we did one for them that was in camo, which is really nice camouflage. And we did one that was, uh, the same as their iconic boot. Yep. So the bottom of it's brown and the top of it is a light brown and top of it's dark brown. And it's got embossed stitching on it and they sell very well. And it's nice for us because it's a nice job to do. It's nice for them because they make money on it. But for us, it also allows us to reach an audience that might not be familiar with field notes. Cause now they might go to the website, right? Because they like those notebooks. Exactly. Right.

Brian Bedell: I mean, it's, yeah, we'll do it. If it's always got to be just a good deal for both of us, you know, we both got something out of the deal.

Jim Coudal: And brand wise, it's got to be a good fit. Yeah. Like we've turned down a lot of stuff that we're like, yeah, that doesn't really, you know, that doesn't feel like the right kind of thing. Or people like, yeah, okay, we'll do it just like your field notes, but we want the picture of the CEO on the cover. We're like, no, no, I don't think so. Yeah. Or whatever. Yeah.

Brian Bedell: Unless your CEO has like a really good beard, maybe. Your CEO is a farmer or something.

Myke Hurley: Guys, thank you so much for giving us your space and your time and giving us something to talk about every few weeks. We appreciate that.

Jim Coudal: We can do it anytime you want. It's been nothing but easy. We thought you guys were going to grill us the whole time. Is it over already?

Brian Bedell: I've got lots of shipping information to tell you guys about.

Myke Hurley: Well, I mean, if you want one more question, I have one more question. We can go ahead. I have one more question. I wasn't sure. Okay.

Subscription Boxes

Myke Hurley: There are a lot of stationary subscriptions available now.

Myke Hurley: And I guess that you guys were probably the first to do that.

Jim Coudal: I think we were, yeah.

Myke Hurley: And there are lots of notebooks. There are lots of pens and pencils and boxes and stuff like that. What do you think about this?

Brian Bedell: I mean, we didn't invent notebooks and we didn't invent subscriptions. And so all we can do is make the best ones we can, make ones we like, and hope other people like them too. I don't know what else to say about it really other than that.

Jim Coudal: I don't know. I mean, I think we've run into that in other businesses that we've done. The deck, for example, the ad network. Of course. And you just go do the best, like Brian says, you do the best job you can. And, you know, it's a compliment. And we're pretty good at it. We sell a lot of subscriptions.

Myke Hurley: So I'm not too worried about it. I think it makes it harder or easier for you to sell yours, the fact that there are more.

Brian Bedell: I don't know. I mean, I think there are certainly people that get... Multiple. Yeah, get multiple. You know, even with something like Loot Crate, people get several boxes like that maybe a month.

Jim Coudal: So I think more people writing in analog notebooks in more places is better for field notes. And some of the people who are doing what we are doing are doing a really nice job of producing products. And I think that all of that just makes the notebook market bigger. Rising tide, right? Yeah. Couldn't agree more. It makes the notebook market bigger. And I think our advantage by not necessarily inventing it but starting this sort of pioneering this thing is that we've got momentum and we've got a lot of people so we can do dime novel. Yeah, you're always a step ahead, right? We can do dime novel. Like that's a difficult thing to do to put all the resources together to get that thing done as well as the marketing materials. And, you know, that's really satisfying. And, you know, people have a lot to write down. They need places to write it down. So I think it's okay.

Myke Hurley: Any more questions, Brad?

Brad Dowdy: No. I'm just glad they had us. I'm glad they didn't kick us out. They answered the door today, Myke.

Jim Coudal: And, you know, now that it is over, I have to tell you this was one of my favorite podcasts.

Myke Hurley: Thank you. Well, thank you. That's very kind. We appreciate it. FieldNoseBrand.com is the best place to go to find out more and buy and make sure you're a subscriber so you get the special commemorative reprint. Can't wait for that. I love those, by the way, the commemorative stuff because it's like this is a brand that people are attached to. And I think it's nice to appreciate that. Right? If people are collecting everything you do, it's nice to throw on the bottom.

Jim Coudal: We had more fun doing that than just about anything. Just because we knew when they arrived in people's houses, people were going to go crazy. So, and then that was just fun to watch Twitter and Instagram light up. Yeah. Definitely get you. That was so fun.

Myke Hurley: Thanks again to Squarespace for sponsoring the show. And another thank you to our Kickstarter backers for helping us do this. You can find our show notes today at Relay.fm slash PenAddict slash 279. You can follow Brad at PenAddict.com and all the different social media places. There are too many to list today. There's four people here. I can't do all of it. Yeah. I think I'll go mad. But we'll be back next week with another regular episode. And this is the last of our North American tour. For this year. For this year. 2017's a wrap.

Jim Coudal: You should have done black t-shirts with the names of the... We thought about it.

Myke Hurley: We were thinking about doing it. I mean, there's still time. If we want to do a t-shirt for the end of the year, we can still do it. Tour shorts, yeah. But thanks so much for listening. We'll be back next week. Until then, say goodbye, guys. Goodbye, guys. Goodbye, guys. Goodbye, guys.

Brian Bedell: Goodbye.