The first exciting development this week was a huge RFP for an agency I’ve been working with; a chance to work with a large multinational across all of their brands (and it’s an extremely enviable portfolio). A brilliant opportunity, but one that will obviously be quite competitive.

As ever, the challenge is to do enough to win the work, without doing so much that you bankrupt yourself. But it’s one of those opportunities that you’d so kick yourself if you missed out on that the temptation is to do more rather than less. We’ll see how that goes.

The second, and personally even more exciting, development is that we had our first production day for the super-secret startup that I’ve mentioned a few times before.

We requisitioned the some kitchen space and set up the various bits of second-hand and cobbled-together machinery that we’ve been acquiring over the last couple of months. A little over eight hours later, we’d produced a few units short of our 1,800 target, which is enough for our first sales run and a lot of sampling. (So we averaged one unit every 17 seconds across the day, which doesn’t feel too shabby. No wonder we were knackered at the end of it, though.)

It’s an amazing feeling to see something that’s only been an idea for six months suddenly transform, within a day, into something tangible. As soon as we’re ready to go public, I’ll let you all know what it is and how to get your grubby mitts on it.

It’s also clear that the manufacturing side of the business is immensely fulfilling. It would’ve been much easier to go to a co-packer and get them to do the hard work, but it’s so much more satisfying to figure out the process flow, figure out how to optimise it, solve the problems as they crop up, and generally be able to take a step back and say “we made these” rather than “we bought these”.

The next step, assuming the launch goes well, will be to find some more permanent space, perhaps to set up multiple lines, and crucially to get an automatic label applicator machine up and running. I suspect it’s the start of a long (endless?) journey of tinkering and optimisation, but the nerdy engineer in me is excited about that.