Yes, its been a while since we did a post!

We finally got around to doing some product shots last week. We got lucky, I didn’t even have to drag out my camera setup, our office neighbour was already doing some test shoots for some of his products, so I latched onto that quick quick, and we now have some usable artwork. Yay!

Full size shots are available for download on the press page.

Fruits of our efforts are below, enjoy!:

Born in the UK and raised in South Africa, Lawrence Sheed moved to Shanghai in 1994 to set up an IT department for a successful clothing company. But he had a side project. A very cool side project. For Lawrence Sheed builds his own arcade machines.

“I’ve always liked arcade machines,and around 2002 I thought, ‘Hey, why don’t I build one,’” he explains. Back then he imported all the parts as he couldn’t find anything locally. “So I built one, and friends would come round and go, ‘Holy shit! What the hell? Where did you get this?’ I would say that I’d made it and they would ask to buy one.”

He sold half a dozen or so, mostly to bars and clubs, names of yore such as Judy’s, Pegasus and the Big Bamboo. You can still find one of his machines in Bubba’s BBQ on Hongqiao Lu.

These days Sheed sources stuff in China. “The best place in the world is Taobao. I love Taobao. If you look carefully there are lots of places where you can buy old crap from Japan. Then we order the buttons from a factory in Guangzhou, the joysticks from somewhere else.”

He shows us an original Neo-Geo cartridge. “These used to cost hundreds of dollars in the US originally. Now they’re RMB100 or so. You can buy ones with hundreds of games on them for a couple of hundred.”

Sheed says his machines usually have 200-300 games on them, and customers can pick and choose the ones they want. We’re talking Metal Slug, Street Fighter, Pac- Man, Bubble Bobble, Asteroids and Defender. “You can basically run any games on them.”

They can also customize the look of your machine. “For things like bars we’ll throw their logo on and make a graphic for them. For home clients we can make an original style Pac-Man or Space Invaders or whatever. And it’s not just that, it’s that plus hundreds of games.”

So to the big question – how much do his machines cost? “We’re kind of bespoke,” explains Sheed. “I can get the big plastic things for about RMB1,500 on Taobao fully done. But mine are smaller and customized for home use – so table-sized – and we’re selling them for RMB4,500.”

He says the only difficulty he has building them for himself is finishing the job. “The problem with making arcade machines is you get to a certain point where it works and it plays, and it’s like, ‘Do I need to spend the other two hours doing it up now I can turn it on and play the game?’”

Don’t let that put you off ordering one though. “For the client stuff, it’s got to be done and out,” Sheed assures us.

Shanghai Talk has put us in their gift guide in the December 2011 edition.

We’re in the top right corner of the gift guide. Unfortunately one small mistake – the price is wrong!

I just know going to hear more griping from people complaining about that 12rmb price difference from their published 88RMB (where did they pick that from?) vs the actual price of 100RMB

Click below for a full size version.

Shanghai family (a City Weekend production) put a small page up about the Magnets, but unfortunately didn’t put a link to us. Shanghai Lollipop, one of the stores that carries us got a link instead.

Wonderful. The page in question is here – http://www.shfamily.com/blog/2011/06/12/fresh-tips-bits-for-the-summer/

Oh well, some publicity is better than no publicity, and I have put a comment on their blog page about that.

In other news, we’re currently on our 3rd reprint for the Magnets – so they’re doing quite well.
We’re currently out of stock till the reprints arrive, mostly as my assistant didn’t order as many boxes as I asked for.

I told her to get 1000 boxes, she only ordered 500… and they take about 3 weeks from ordering till delivery. Doh!

So…. this time I took control, and I’ve re-ordered 5000 boxes now to ensure it doesn’t happen again, (plus a few thousand more magnets). We should have new stock at the end of the month assuming our printers don’t make the usual mistakes with the glue and we have to send them back yet again.
QC – something I do, and they don’t hehe…

The Fridge lingo Published in the 《CITY WEEKEND 城市周刊》Magazine.

Magazine picture shown on the left.

Talking to your Ayi

Sex in the City

Food,Glorious Food!

The Fridge lingo Published in the 《That’s Shanghai》Magazine.

Magazine picture shown on the left.

Despite us sending them  corrections, sadly they got both my name wrong, and the website wrong.  Score one for accuracy, sigh.

We got interviewed by Urbanatomy (the people doing That’s Shanghai these days) for an upcoming article.  Warm thanks to Panthea Lee for hooking us up!

When I spot the article, I’ll scan it and post it also!

My Q&A’s below:

Do you have a personal story behind the product? Any situations in the past or in general that really made you wish you spoke more Chinese?

I’ve had plenty of situations where I wished I spoke more Chinese!

The most memorable example I have is this one –
The first week I arrived here in late 94, my then boss took us for a night on the town, which in those days consisted of Long Bar, the infamous JJ’s,  New York New York (complete with smoking room), Casablanca etc.
Some time during the night he snuck off, leaving me stuck at 3am with no idea where I was!
I had no real idea where I lived at that time either, so I hopped into the first cab I saw, and after driving around aimlessly for 20 minutes or so, the driver decided to take me to the airport.  These were the days prior to the gaojia – we only had the outer ringroad, so it took a while. Eventually at around 5am we passed a familiar landmark (the Rainbow / Galaxy hotels), and I stopped the car and got out.   I sat in the lobby for about 3 hours until our office opened, so I could call and ask for someone to come help me get home.  Interesting times…

Whats the story behind Fridge Lingo?

We’re selling the magnet sets at our iWantOne website.   That website started out as an outlet for our badges.
The badges themselves started out from a post on LPCoverLover via a sighting on BoingBoing.  (more on this at our Computer Solutions blog here – http://www.computersolutions.cn/blog/2009/04/random-semi-interesting-thing/ )

A quick trip to taobao, and we had a badge machine, and lots of idea’s.
These quickly culminated in my staff going nuts over snoopy badges, and my prompting them for cool stuff for foreigners (foreigners are suckers for cultural revolution related artwork).

We quickly got bored doing that, and moved onto cool phrases.
Coffee at Moganshan lu led to a brainstorming session about cool ways to promote Shanghainese (an under promoted language imho), and a whole set of cool phrases.

One of our clients (the lovely Jenny @ Redgate China) asked me why we didn’t put an English translation on the badges as well. Which, to be honest, I’d thought about, but as I’m a pretentious I can speak Chinese better than you so nya nya kind of foreigner, didn’t want to do. Plus it also meant remaking a bunch of badges, and I’m lazy.
*Pick one of the above for the correct answer.

It did lead me to think, well hey, why don’t I make some magnet word sets like you used to see a few years back when Magnet Poetry was all the craze.

An idea was born…

A few days later, we had our first rough draft of the first magnet set we wanted to make “Talking to your Ayi”, and a few agonizing days later teaching my art team how to use illustrator correctly so I didn’t have to spend over 12 hours redoing their alleged “good” version *again*, we had something we could play around with. This also involved some running with scissors, and lots of small pieces of sharp paper, to put the danger, and comic tragedy of it all into perspective.

A quick round or two with friends, roman’s and countrymen, and we had most of the mistakes corrected also.
Interesting factoid – I could point out more mistakes than the native speakers could.

Even more weeks passed and we had a sample set. Even more weeks x2 later, lots of shouting, changes, and scowling (followed by light rain), we actually had a box design that I liked, and all was good.

This was closely followed by lots of my own money changing hands with dodgy factories in outer godknowswhere, a minor whoops at the factory meaning a reprint, and finally a rather large kuaidi delivery to our office later, I actually had a product in my hands, yay!

Its been rather fun making something that people can buy (or I can throw at the kuaidi guy), instead of our usual intangible products – websites, websites, and more websites.
Does your product help with grammar?

Probably not, is the short answer.

The long answer is, we did put some consideration into what words we used, and what phrases we put in the set, so that people could make sentences that would be syntactically correct, or failing that understandable!
We accomplished this by spending a few days cutting up large segments of what is left of the rain forest (all testing was done on recycled office paper) to ensure that we would be understandable.
It is however, a cool way to look at words and make sentences though, even if the end result is not necessarily grammatically correct.  It does definitely add to understanding why things do or do not work (assuming you have someone looking over your shoulder to correct you!)
How intimate does your “sex in the city” product really go?

We’re not going to be overtly naughty, but we also aren’t going to be innocuous either!
We’re aiming at the happy medium of “naughty but nice”.  This means  phrases like satisfied (man yi /  满意 ) and unsatisfied (bu man yi / 不满意 ) mix in with stuff like Playboy -(hua hua gong zi /  花花公子 ).
I’m also going to be including some modern day idioms －  (Li Yu /  俚语) for my own amusement also.

An example of a modern day idiom is below:
Old cows eat tender grass – “老牛吃嫩草”

You can buy the set to see what that means!

I think we’re probably aiming this one squarely at the male section of the market, although its equally usable for ladies also.

Just curious, are there any phrases that appear in both sets of your product?
Yes, some phrases will appear in different sets, although we’re keeping that to a bare minimum (these are common words like I, We… etc)

How have the magnets been received by your customers? Do they really use them? And are they popular?

We’ve only just started selling them this month, so we haven’t really seen them in actual use yet, other than by myself in the office!
I’m happy with initial sales though – so far we’re selling a few boxes a day online via word of mouth at our http://www.iwantone.cn site.
Pretty much every foreigner that walks into our office has taken a look at our office fridge,  said “Cool idea!”, and buys a set too!

Do you use the magnets yourself?

Aside from misuse of the “Please empty the cat litter” one, I’ll plead the 5th.
I speak to the Ayi in Chinese at home if I’m there when she comes, although she still refers to me as “Lao Wai Xiang Sheng”…

We do leave each other love notes on the fridge though, with missives like “Please buy some toilet paper”, and “Please don’t forget to pay me next week”.
I do look forward to abusing the Sex and the City set though, although I’m not sure I like the ayi *that* much!

I have honestly improved my Chinese in certain area’s though – I finally know how to say ear, boil (water), and cook, as well as other things correctly in Chinese!

What are you working on now?

Online, we have also been busy;  We just launched a Tiny URL clone for China http://liurl.cn last month (for fun, not profit!), that has started to take off.
Smart Shanghai is using it for their Twitter Links, and a couple of Chinese sites appear to be using it (although haven’t officially informed us yet).

We blog about that here – http://blog.liurl.cn

Offline (aka in the real world)

This is our first actual product, and although it was quite a lot more work than I realised,  I’m quite proud of it!
We have plenty of idea’s for our future sets;  Cooking, Shopping and other idea’s have already been bandied around the office.
We’re also looking at working on making Japanese and Korean versions so we can target the other large expat communities in Shanghai.

I’d love to do a Shanghainese set…

People can send us suggestions, corrections, and idea’s at http://www.fridgelingo.com

Thanks for listening.

We had an email from James @ Shanghaiist asking for some additional product shots of the actual words, so I grabbed my trusty camera, cleared the front of the fridge, and well…  you can see the results below:

(Click each image for a larger version)

Fridge Lingo Magnets in use

Random collection of words from Fridge Lingo :: Set 1 - Talking to the Ayi

Random crap sentence I made up using the Fridge Lingo :: Set 1 - Talking to your Ayi

Smart Shanghai Fridge Lingo Review

We have our very first press from the boys over at SmartShanghai, who gave us a quick review.

Thanks for the positive feedback guys, and enjoy the Magnets!