SecondMoonshot

  Trying to streamline my content, I am now posting all new content on our Facebook page  and on SecondMoonshot.com John

A brainchild of Carrie acting as VP of Branding and Pit Bulls decided we needed a real online store for the Custom Framing business. So now you will see that SecondMoonshot.com will take you to the new site. The blog will remain here for true blog functions. All items for purchase on the site are Free Shipping. The next step will be significantly expand the pop culture framed ads.  Check it out! John

I am going to start creating and reselling vintage magazine ads focus initially on music and car categories. These will be custom framed by me and no 2 will be alike and can make one to your design needs as well. In addition, I also have album cover and vinyl record frames which can either be sealed on the back or have turn buttons on the back so you can insert and replace yourself.  Samples below:

I got some new business cards that are focused on the Custom Framing, pic is front and back.  We went simple and the frame corners was my idea! Although everything else was Carrie’s. Keeping it simple with no address as that may be fluid over next 12 months. Also renting a small office space at 102 W Nash St (home of One Man’s Treasure) in Spring Hope to meet potential customers for framing and where I will keep all the samples. Will take a few weeks to get it ready. And a pic of me and Carrie from the past. Not sure who controlled my “style”, if there is any…but clearly she loves me anyway. Oh, and Sydney…not feeling well lately. Ate one too many baby bunnies.  John

Our first T-shirt we got for SecondMoonshot was from Zazzle and ended up costing about $25 per shirt. That made it cost prohibitive for any quantity and I have been meaning to dabble into printing my own T-shirts. Originally I was going to go all-in and get my own heat press, but turns out my neighbor just bought one for similar reasons and he rarely uses it.  After digging around to find where I was going to get the transfers, I ended up with TransferExpress.com . I thought about getting one of those CriCut machines, but really not ready to jump into that boat as not really interested in doing much more nor making a business out of it. Their editing tools are excellent and support all the image types we needed. I opted to not mess with a proof and just ordered 25 gang sheets (sheets which you can cut into the individual components).  These are 12” x 15” sheets or thereabouts and I have 2 big logos with tag line for the back of T-Shirts and about 9 smaller logos and just the name for t

Carrie (our VP of Branding) has been working on some new computer design skills and refining them for almost a year now and is near completion of a custom font called “SecondMoonshot”. Our original vision was to maintain the hand drawn theme similar to our logo and this font is 100% made up from her own print handwriting. Creating fonts is much more complex than it sounds and she had to overcome several challenges. This week during a road trip, she pulled out her iPad and she filled in some missing characters we wanted and this will be our v1 version. She’s making a few final tweaks and the SecondMoonshot logo is even one of the characters! Our intent is to use this font for our printed materials such as the company info inset sheet which I put into every package shipped. Then we were looking to get a new kiss sticker (from stickermule.com) which I use to also include with hanging hardware for any framing job or picture sold. This work is top level professional work and very excited ab

Zabrina reminded me I haven’t done a blog post in a bit, so figured a general update would be good. We are going through a devastating loss which occurred mid-October and finding it difficult to get back into pretty much everything. Bear with us. I am doing a consignment for a neighbor with a lot of baseball memorabilia and vintage comic books. Pretty much all listed and sales of the comics has been off the charts. This should motivate me to list some more of my own collection.  I have made an agreement with a local vintage and antique store to co-sell all shippable inventory on eBay. This gives me a great opportunity to get a lot of high quality listings out, with no overhead but only a portion of the profits. Excited to see how it works out. There are a few other opportunities we are looking at which I will share at a later date. Still trying to grow the art and custom framing business, have a handful of paying projects I am working on, and offering exceptional deals on framing throu

Over the last few months, I have invested in some new equipment that will allow some new capabilities on wooden frames, offer more consistent results in mat board cutting, and more clearly set expectations on pricing and options. Frame Recovery and Reduction First things first. I realized that even with 100s of frames, that by itself, still provides limited options to any specific piece to be framed. It has to be in the appropriate style, color and in an appropriate size. Even with the first few customers, I noticed that while I had a lot of frames, it just wasn’t working. I needed to be able to provide more flexibility yet still leverage the large inventory of used high quality frames on the market via auctions, estate sales, thrift stores, and who knows where else. To this end, I decided I would start doing frame reduction on wood frames (not metal). I would remove the miter joints, cut them down to proper size for a piece of interest and then glue and V-nail them together. It’s a Lo