We received a holiday packaged today from our friend Miyu in Japan. It was really fun to open! Miyu sent Alex and I two “pocketable” eco bags with this cute little note:
"In Japan, we're trying to not have (get) plastic bag at supermarket. I always bring a bag for shopping! Please use it with Alex!!"
Of course we already have tons of reusable bags (and more for sale in the store), but none so adorably Japanese. Yeah for the global spread of sustainability!
Though we are based in central Ohio, we find ourselves shipping more and more items to Canada. We suspect that the exchange rates favoring the Canadian dollar have something to do with this. We may also attract customers because shipping for most items is less than $5 via first class mail to Canada.
Whatever the reason, we appreciate our customers from every country.
My one complaint about SIGG bottles to this point has been the slick enamel finish on most bottles. It looks great, goes well over SIGG's unique designs and is no problem to hold with bare hands. However, if you put gloves on, it is very slick to hold.
Enter the 'Touch' finish.
The touch finish is an epoxy coating with a texture additive. It is very simple, and under use has proven itself to be very durable. The texture coating offers a firm grip but it is not uncomfortably rough on bare hands. Currently SIGG offers this finish in both their 1L Traveler water bottle and in their .75L Active style.
The downside to the 'Touch' finish is that it can't be applied over any of SIGG's unique designs. While there is no official word on why, I would suspect the texture additive exhibits too much opacity to allow effective use in a clear coating. For my personal tastes this is no problem as I naturally prefer the solid colors.
I recently used the 1L Traveler Blue Touch on a two week trip to Mumbai, India. While there I put it through its paces as my primary drinking accessory. If you travel in the third world, it is good to have a plan for your drinking water. Even in Western-style hotels and modern cities, the water supply can be contaminated with a variety of objectionable nasties. I poured boiling sterilized water into it with no harm to the inner liner or to the exterior paint coating (try that with a Nalgene bottle!). I treated water inside it with Sodium Chlorite tablets at no detrimental effect to the bottle. And finally, it survived 16,000 miles of airline travel with no problems in my checked baggage.
I used it extensively in my hotel rooms and while traveling to various companies I was visiting. I was always able to maintain a good grip on it even when wet and had no problems with the 1L size.
For my purposes, this seems to be the perfect water container.
So we buy helmets as surplus from the Department of Defense. As part of the purchasing process, we must complete an End Use Certificate (EUC) stating what the final disposition of the purchased items will be. The rationale for this is that kevlar helmets are items that both the State Department and Commerce Department place restrictions on. As such, we may only export them to certain countries and in certain quantities.
If you are reading this from your local cyber-cafe in Pyongyang, I am sorry to inform you that I cannot sell you ten kevlar helmets.
Since we have made several purchases from the Department of Defense along these lines, our names came up as being ripe for an audit to determine our proper handling of these items. So we had a visit from a representative of the DoD this morning. She was very pleasant and courteous, and was pleased to see that we are controlling our products very well. She gave us a thumbs up on our understanding of the trade regulations and left after a short while. It ended up being a fairly uneventful encounter all-in-all.
It was interesting as for most of my professional career, I have been in the shoes of the auditor in one form or another. I am used to asking the questions, not answering them, and this experience gave me at least a slightly better understanding of how the relationship feels from the other end.
