Here’s the most recent update from Ironlak’s Founder and Company Director recapping his September trip to China.
This post was written in October.
Palms and I landed in Hong Kong and took the bus across to where the Little General picks us up on the mainland. Soon after, we went for a short meeting with a supplier about some of our markers to try to get better quality components moving forward. (Watch this space – big things are planned.)
On the second or third day we had a bit of free time, so Palmsy and I went for some quick chromies on bare brick to make sure we’re still the benchmark for coverage. Of course the paint came up trumps. Afterwards we went out to dinner with some officials from the safety bureau and ended up skulling red wine. I woke up feeling fine all things considered but after about an hour I was feeling a little worse for wear. Not terrible, but certainly not firing on all cylinders either. Thankfully a cold morning shower sorted me out.
Friday night we went to a different city to meet with an old friend of ours. We didn’t get into town until about 11:30pm, so we went to a small street restaurant, had dinner, a few beers then proceeded to play dice. I don’t know the name of the game but it’s a bit like poker, and when you lose you drink. It’s like that old NBA slogan “I love this game”; you’re either killing or being killed. Anyone with a remotely competitive bone in their body will love the game, plus you get to make other people drunk, which is a good laugh!
At this point Palmsy headed home and Tues joined me at the factory.
Because I’m getting married in about a month (that’s my heart), it was my last trip to China for a while, so we had a pretty long list of tasks to get through in terms of product tweaks and minor changes etc. Midway through my trip (about a week in) the frustration started to set in. Usually things go fairly well, but at the moment all of our key technical staff are so stretched that it’s a little difficult to free them up enough to get certain non-production tasks done. With time evaporating I was getting more and more frustrated. As the trip progressed we started knocking a few things on the head. These guys really worked their arses off in the lead up to the fall holiday period. As frustrating as it was on a work trip, the downtime allowed Tuesy and I get a bit of painting done.
On the previous trip we worked on removing the floatation in the pigments (where you can see some separation in the pigments on the wall), we removed the blushing (where you get a milky white texture over the paint in high humidity) and with winter approaching in Europe and the USA, making sure our paint worked well in the colder climates. We checked on these again and the boxes were all ticked.
This trip we spent time tweaking the chrome and gold formulations. It’s vital heading into winter that people can trust and depend on them, so we got that nailed and did some cold weather testing as well. Hopefully that stock will hit Europe around late November or early December.
We spent the rest of the time working on a few new things that I can’t comment on for the moment. The improvements should filter through in the coming months and we’ll make everyone well aware of the benefits of these changes. We need to do more testing on them and I’d rather not update you until they’re actually finished. Just keep an eye on the blog for future updates.
Before leaving the factory we had a mini banquet and drinking session in the food hall with the employees to celebrate the commencement of the Fall Holiday in October. Everyone was in good spirits toasting with one another. With so many people in such close proximity, the place was loud as fuck, and people got drunk in a hurry.
Tues and I rocked back into Shenzhen on the Friday arvo, tired as hell after the few nights of drinking and celebrating the coming of the Fall Holiday Festival. Tiredness aside, we hit up our man Touch to see if he was keen to go painting. We ended up under a bridge just on dark for an hour or so and did some quick cool pieces. In hindsight I wish that mine was a bit more bottom heavy, as that’s what I was going for. We went back to our hotel, showered up, knocked out some work and enjoyed some late night entertainment before crashing for the night – I threw on “Boyz N the Hood” while Tues caught up on the latest breaking bad episodes.
The next morning Tues hit me up to go for breakfast, but after having eaten the same thing week in and week out over the course of five years I didn’t feel like it. He went without me and came back all Bates-inspired with some bullshit sketch leaving me a little concerned I was going to get embarrassed on the wall later that day. Lucky for me he toned it down a bit.
We’d already burned through all the Ironlak chrome we had earlier in the week, so after brekky we picked up some chrome from a local hardware store and walked down the street for some quick crewies. After that we went and ordered some unhealthy-but-tasty pizza just to get some Western-style flavour into us. We chilled for a few hours and jumped in a cab to meet Touch for a painting session that afternoon. It happened to be our last night in China so it was good to finish painting and on a high-note.
The next morning we headed back for Hong Kong to catch our flight home.
As they love saying in China “Game Over”.