On our first leg of our North by Northeast Nüggi Tour, we investigate, as a family, if the business we started is worth continuing. In 4 months, we intend to give away Nuggis, the product, to people who cross our paths.
one of the world's many Nuggi models
The Best Laid Plans: another possible tour name, or B.L.P, which means that ideally I would have had video of the inception process, but I don’t. That I would have made better choices, put in more effort, given it some time. Giving away a business is a similar process to how I’ve run things in the past: Loosely. We sent 10 boxes of Nüggis into the world to what we call Key Distribution points, points along our journey, measured in fistfuls of colors but favoring Camel and Light Blue. The goal: ‘get them out there.’ I believe when you hang on to stock in anything, be it beef, money, Nüggis, or love, you devalue it. And nothing devalues a business like fleece in the Caribbean. But we saw modest sales and great enthusiasm.
“Your Nüggi saved me.” I believe in Nüggi and have a hard time not giving my sales pitch to people receiving free ones; I will remain Nüggi’s greatest fan. Not because I made it, but because I made it for me. But there is the moral obligation to the larger questions in life that makes the retention of 2000+ fleece hats unnecessary. And we were moving. And traveling for many months in the cold North. Come along with me as I go out of business! People ask me where they can buy another one and it pains me to tell them that there are simply no more, that they shouldn’t order them online as the Paypal function is still up but really no one is home. For a length of time the site only said “Hosting Has Expired,” which wouldn’t generate confidence in anyone looking online for it, but it wasn’t actually a lie either. [It is back online now at www.mynuggi.com.]
author & nuggi designer amy with daughter pj in montana
It’s not that I intended to go into or out of business so Laissez-faire, well, maybe I did. I wanted it to be ‘my ideal job’ in an extremely vague way that I once funneled into a Business Plan which remains on both a computer file and a back-up CD somewhere. It has a graph with an exponential sales curve. Peripherally, I learned a lot about business. That you need to dedicate time to it was the main thing I learned. That was what got me. I liked not dedicating time to it. I can list the other things I spent my time doing and having a great time of it except for a short pile of working-for-the-man-hours where the Dream of Nüggi really took off, but overall it was a really blessed time to be me.
Having to deal with convincing others that my product was very cool was not very fun. It was like starting at a new school every day and trying to be cool when you feel lame. And the other tough part was dealing with the people who help get your product to market. The people who sew it, but inside out. The lost boxes, receipts, filing, unpaid invoices. There were a lot of headaches, a lot of dread over tasks. Now, giving them away I’ve put more smiles on people’s faces directly than I ever did via mail or through a store. Triplets of Montana hunters, families, coffee house workers, Swedish consulate interns, two men getting their car jump started, radio hosts, college students and food bank staff. The Nüggi is out there right now on these cold nights and getting used. I’m happy to see them go, until the end, until the end…
