Week of March 15, 2021

This was one hard week. Before I get into the logistics of behind the scenes of ZMS, I want to link to a few places to help the Asian-American community:

If any of these nonprofits look good to you, might I suggest thinking about what you can afford monthly, and set up a recurring donation? That way, when the news of what's happening is no longer what's on everyone's minds, we are still financially helping people who work on improving the lives of others as part of their jobs, and are ready to do this in the long run.

Three dollars a month adds up with time, you know?

As for this company, we spent a lot of back and forth with setting up facebook and instagram so people could buy our products without leaving those platforms.

I'm personally indifferent to it. We already sell at a lot of places that take fees or a part of our sale, what's another place?

Questioning the morality of Facebook is a different thing altogether, but I also believe knowing Facebook and Instagram, they're going to start really suppressing e-commerce sites if they DON'T integrate their store onto the platform. I think it's similar to what happened to ads, pages, and organic reach on social media. The organic reach was really really good in the past, and now you have to pay to get a fraction of that attention.

I think this is an evolution, or another form, of that.

It hasn't been easy. Actually, it's been surprisingly difficult, setting things up to work. One of the things that makes so many sites do so well, like shopify, ebay, etsy, etc. Are how easy it is to set up and start selling.

Setting up with facebook has been like pulling teeth, similar to Amazon, I suppose. And I suppose that is showing us the direction that facebook wants to go. They sort of want to compete against Amazon, and not fulfill anything, hah.

As for the creative end of things, while some designs have been reviewed, or approved, or just submitted, I am experiencing more micro-managing than normal.

I think that's something I need to learn how to handle better. When working with licensed properties, these characters ain't yours. I will try to dispute some things mostly if I don't believe it's physically possible to manufacture the change they want us to do, and then if it is possible, it will not look good, slow down production time, and raise manufacturing costs... But, for the most part, if they tell me to change a mouth, or a line thickness---Like, fine, I guess. That mouth won't make a difference when it comes to the sales of the product, or turn a good pin into a great pin, but they're looking at a form of marketing their brand.

Oh cool, and as I'm writing this, our account with Amazon is under review cause two pins' barcodes are not scanning. How fun.

Well, let's hope next week is 15% nicer! :D