Joel Bush

Summary:
Would you like to work with a talented, vibrant team that serves many of the web’s most exciting and creative organizations including Glennz Tees, MailChimp, Reddit, Imgur, Rooster Teeth, and LIVESTRONG? Amplifier provides a fully turnkey solution that allows web-based communities to offer physical merchandise to their user base. Our services include product manufacturing, order fulfillment, warehousing, customer support, and returns handling.

This position requires accounting, excel, andI nternet research skills as well as excellent interpersonal communication skills. The position calls for a high level of attention to detail, and the ability to work well with all levels of internal management and staff, as well as outside clients and vendors. It is necessary to be proactive, resourceful, flexible, and efficient while working in a fast paced, rapidly growing environment all while maintaining a high level of professionalism and confidentiality at all times.

Essential Function:
Perform a range of accounting, bookkeeping, and general clerical support functions in an organization. This position will work closely with the Controller and reports to the CFO.

Primary Responsibilities:

• Payables entry and processing
• Client Invoicing activities
• Receivables management and deposit activities preparation
• Inventory reconciliations
• Bank reconciliations
• Assist with payroll processing and data entry
• Assist with HR paperwork and employee document processing as needed
• Assist with the closing of the books each month
• Clean up and organize all physical and electronic accounting files and documents
• Provide assistance as needed for any required company audits
• Research accounting issues as needed
• Other special project work as needed
• Occasional help with Executive travel arrangements
• Occasional office manager responsibilities including office supplies ordering and warehouse organization
• Proactively look for ways to improve the accuracy and efficiency of all activities, systems, and procedures associated with managing payroll, accounts payable, expense reimbursements, invoicing and billing, inventory tracking, and HR operations.

Qualifications:

• Minimum of associates degree or equivalent work experience
• Knowledge and understanding of accounting, book keeping, and Generally Accepted Accounting Principles.
• 2+ years of experience in clerical accounting
• Proficient in Microsoft Excel
• Netsuite experience and familiarity is an advantage
• Strong organization skills
• Ability to pay attention to detail and handle accounting transactions with as few errors as possible
• Demonstrated ability to improve accounting department controls, systems, procedures, and organization.
• Ability to work with highly sensitive and confidential information and to maintain the highest levels of confidentiality and integrity
• Ability to handle multiple projects simultaneously
• Ability to remain flexible in managing frequently shifting priorities
• Cheerful, flexible and positive disposition

If you’re interested, apply for the job HERE.

[Click photos to browse]

Introducing one of our newest clients, Rogue American Apparel.

Founded two years ago by a former Marine, Rogue sells exquisitely designed apparel for “the elite Military, High Threat Security Professionals & Law Enforcement” communities among others.  Given such clientele labor under the specter of continuous threat, it’s no surprise that Rogue’s styles feature skulls, crossbones and other grim reaperish motifs. Yet Rogue’s designs don’t make death into an end, it’s merely a potential means to the greater end of Liberty itself.  Harm’s way is the journey, with Freedom the destination.

Not only do they celebrate those who live in harm’s way for others, they also donate a portion of all their profits to the Brothers In Arms Foundation.

Rogue’s the real McCoy and we are proud to call them a client.  Check their store out for yourself and pick up one of their many fantastic designs.

Rudy’s BBQ for yesterday’s lunch.  Amy’s Ice Cream cakes for today’s desserts.  calorically speaking, it’s been a brutal couple of days. 

All Hands Meeting

Yesterday, March 27th, we held an all hands meeting at Amplifier. During yesterday’s all hands meeting, Everyone ate huge, ridiculous, almost debilitating portions of Rudy’s BBQ.  Pretty cruel when you consider that after the meeting everyone had to go back to work instead of take a nap.

We surprised the crew by handing out embroidered Red Kap workshirts. (If you don’t know Red Kap, they make some of the best work wear in the business.)  We thought it would be cool to color code our teams by their department. Do so enables visitors to instantly grasp what’s happening in the often raging sea of activity on a typical day. 

Color schemes were: 

5 Year Jerseys

We also took a moment to recognize employees who had put in more than 5 years at Amplifier with a special handmade flannel baseball jersey.  We do hard work here.  Anyone who has made it five years has put in unbelievable hours. No matter what their department, it’s a given the “5 years” have packed thousands of orders, worked many a holiday, and generally done so with a great attitude.

These jerseys were a secret. Only our founders knew about them.  We just asked employee for their favorite number between 1 and 100.  They didn’t know it but they were picking their team number.  

• Joel Bush - #1
• Paco Contreras - #20
• LeVar Fresch - #77
• Jud Harris - #67
• Topher Hyink - #17
• James McNown - #2
• Doug Sewell -#33
• Jef Sewell - #00
• Macon Stokes - #7
• John Totman - #44
• Chris Vreeland - #23
• Terry Wallace - #3

Very soon Tanya Johnson and Cody Isaacks will join the 5 year club.  We hope everyone working here today sticks around to earn a jersey.  They’re a great crew and we’re proud of all of them! 

During our Beta period, users gave us terrific suggestions. Great minds must think alike.  Most of you told us very similar things.  Here’s what you asked for:

1. Women’s Tees - This was hands down the biggest request. Unisex blanks just weren’t cutting it. You can now add designs using the American Apparel 2102, the most popular Women’s Tee that they sell.
2. A “Value Tee” Option - Some of you wanted a more traditional shirt style and a less expensive shirt. You got it!  Now you can create shirts on the well known, classic-fit Gildan Tee. And yes ladies, our Value Tees are available in Men’s AND Women’s cuts (2000 & 5000L.) 
3. Add Multiple Colors at Once - You now can create up to 12 different colors at once! Just click to turn on/off every color swatch you want to sell. If you want to preview them, simply click the color swatch under the preview area. We’ll also create thumbnails for each color and push them all to your store.

Last but not least, we lowered our prices on American Apparel tees!  White Tees now start at $16 instead of $19! Color American Apparel tees are cheaper too! Hey, we did tell prices were subject to change. Every once in a while, that’s a good thing!  Existing Merchify users can check out the newest features here. 

Don’t have Merchify yet? No problem, it’s free for all Shopify users to install.  Not yet a Shopify user?  Get a free 14-day trial here. It’s the easiest way in the world to start selling made-on-demand products from your very own online store.

Hosted the ever-awesome Christina Xu (@Chrysaora) of @Breadpig fame.  Publishers of the most successful Kickstarter Publishing Project…EVAH!  Ryan North’s “To Be or Not To Be.”  Breadpig also publishes the powerhouse Kickstarters of Zach Weiner, no stranger to these pages.

While we’re sharing… Here’s the post-remodel office in Amplifier’s Suite 103. (Pulled out carpet, stained the concrete and put in a real kitchen.)

(Scroll Right to view them all)

A few scenes from Amplifier’s 2013 SXSW adventures. (they’re not even over yet!)  Being in Austin, we’re fortunate the Internet comes to us!

Rooster Teeth’s Burnie Burns joins Kevin Smith, Lisa Kudrow and others to discuss the Future of TV.  The thing is, Burnie and his wicked crew don’t need to speculate on where the Internet is going in the future.  They are BRINGING THE FUTURE into the now.  If you have ANY interest at all in where Internet, community and original content is going, you need to study every word that rapidly fires out of Burnie Burns’ mouth. 

Filmmaker Kevin Smith (Clerks, Chasing Amy, etc.) summed up Rooster Teeth’s amazing accomplishment like this. “You’re my hero man, your generation is doing what we dreamed about doing… We’re like ‘We want to be independent!’ but we weren’t, ultimately we sold out.  You guys truly are independent, and you’re doing it from a great place, like, ‘this is what we love to do.’ You’re like, ‘I could wait for somebody else to give us some loot or I could build what I want over here.”

Follow @burnie and @roosterteeth on Twitter.

Another highlight of our recent trip to New York was meeting the team behind Maker’s Row. We visited with Matthew Burnett (left) and Tanya Menendez (right) along with designer Scott Weiner (not shown but he rocks similar mojo.) 

So here’s the idea.

Offshoring your manufacturing once presented a nearly irresistible temptation. Hundreds of thousands of jobs have been lost in the last two decades to this option.  US Companies thought they’d save a fortune by leveraging the cheap cost of labor in developing economies.  For a while, it worked.  But in many ways this trend now seems played out.  Rising overseas labor rates coupled with increasing fuel costs have greatly reduced the savings of outsourcing. And when one factors the reduced flexibility and inescapably slow shipping time involved in transoceanic delivery, domestic manufacturing suddenly looks a lot more compelling.

But there remains a problem. While the spirit may be willing to buy from American factories, the flesh often has a hard time finding them. Many possess amazing, proprietary production capabilities and generations of experience, they simply lack Internet-era marketing savvy. 

That’s where Maker’s Row steps in. 

They’re making it unbelievably easy to find even highly specialized makers in the good old United States of America. Search by all manner of capabilities such as Pattern-Makers, Toolers, even Ideation. Want to make a belt? Check out Universal Elliot. Custom handbags?  How about Manolucci Handbag Factory.  Wooden buttons you say?  No problem, try Buttonwood Corp.  The possibilities seem limitless.

They say nothing is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.  And speaking as a company who routinely procures all manner of compelling merchandise, we can say that time to look at US production is now.

Congrats and thanks to Maker’s Row for shining a light on our fellow American makers. 

Jud, Joel and Jef got a chance to visit the Shopify World HQ in Ottawa today.  What beautiful offices and what an amazing company.  We also got to see an amazing NHL game with the team. Thanks guys!

How do you create the most popular college comedy site in the US?  Write what you know. That’s how Madison Wickham and Ryan Young built the burgeoning empire that is Total Frat Move. The Austin Business Journal profiled their meteoric rise this week. It’s a terrific article that shows the power of young entrepreneurs who truly understand a unique community.  

Like many “business genesis” stories, it begins with someone quitting their day job.

Madison Wickham told his wife 10 days after their first child was born that he was leaving his corporate job in Web design to start a website based on the humor of his fraternity experience.

And while the idea gave his wife great pause, Wickham was set to move forward in his belief that an audience for such comedy not only existed, but also could be the basis of a fruitful business model.

10 days into being a Dad.  Now THAT is fearless!

But Madison wasn’t alone. His fellow fraternity brother Ryan Young took the plunge with him. The article notes how during the site’s early days, traction was tenuous, and anxieties were high.  Ryan edited site posts from a shattered iPhone while training to become a firefighter.  After gaining some traction, they did the entrepreneurial thing.  They decided to double down and try selling their own branded merchandise. 

And the brand The Rowdy Gentleman was born. 

While they initially began by shipping their own orders, demand for their humorous tees soon proved seemingly insatiable.  That’s where Amplifier came in.  After surveying options, the team chose to outsource distribution to Amplifier.  As our co-founder Joel Bush noted in the article:

“Websites like TFM present new mediums for communicating to-and interacting with-huge fan bases that can be monetized into customer bases,” said Joel Bush, co-founder of Amplifier, an Austin-based fulfillment center that stores, packs and ships much of Rowdy Gentleman’s inventory.

Outsourcing, as Joel later noted, allows phenomena like Total Frat Move to put their feet “back on the gas.”

And in the case of TFM, oh how on the gas it is.  A book deal with a major publisher, a Hollywood film being shopped and, as Ryan Young confidently puts it, “We control the fraternity market.”

Pretty amazing for two years of work!  Congrats guys!

In a recent interview,  IMGUR founder Alan Schaaf noted that his “simple image sharing” service was posting the following numbers:

• 205 million monthly visits
• 45 million monthly visitors
• Over 2 billion page views
• 17% of their traffic was from new visitors

Staggering, right? How did they do it? As Schaaf put it, “I created an image hosting service that doesn’t suck.” Since its humble beginnings, IMGUR has grown into an Internet institution. They join names like REDDIT, Urban Dictionary & Wikipedia in the pantheon of truly indispensable Internet sites.

Yet more perhaps impressive than IMGUR’s remarkable growth curve has been its successful cultivation of community. And where there’s community, there will be merchandise.

IMGUR announced their new online store two days ago. Amplifier is proud to be their merchandising partner.  The swag possibilities are truly enormous! (Bananas shown for scale.)

The Calm Before The Storm.

(In addition to our existing 60,000 sq/ft, Amplifier procured an additional 12,000 sq/ft solely for accelerated Cyber Monday processing. In one week, this will be wall to wall inventory, people and activity.)

Merchify™ differs from most Shopify apps for a very simple reason.  When used, a physical product gets made and shipped.  When you think about it, that is a very powerful capability. Your artwork turns into actual goods whenever an order is placed. Merchify makes this so simple it’s almost easy to forget that designing cool merch is itself often quite hard.

We get it.

So we’ve put together our Top Five recommended practices when creating your artwork.

1. Be Transparent
2. Bigger Isn’t Always Better
3. Know Your Medium
4. Beyond Logo Gear
5. Adding More Thumbnails

1. Be Transparent

Most Merchify users want to sell T-Shirts. If you’re one of them, then this video is for you. Transparency is the most important tool to master if you want to produce eye-catching apparel. 

2. Bigger Isn’t Always Better

Just because you can upload 14”x”16” artwork into Merchify doesn’t mean you should.  We’ve seen some users simply uploading the biggest artwork they can.  Occasionally this looks terrific. But more often just looks like a humongous image on a shirt.

Think about your goals.

This is a shirt, not a poster.  So unless you’ve got a very compelling design that only works large, consider making your artwork smaller.  And of course when you’ve built an item, place an order for one.  That way you can see for yourself how it looks.

3. Know Your Medium

Merchify initially offers five unique products.  Each one differs greatly from the other and serves a specific function.  So before you simply throwing your logo onto each unique product, ask yourself, “What reason would my customer want to buy this?” When you think about it, different products often meet dramatically different needs.

Coffee Mugs make for great icebreakers. They’re inherently portable. People take them into meetings, they’re often a subtle tool for self-identification in the workplace.  Humor particularly sells well on mugs.

T-Shirts, while even more portable, are far from subtle.  More than any other medium, people use apparel to declare their membership in a particular tribe. Sometimes this is through text, other times through symbols and artwork. Often the meaning of the shirt isn’t obvious, instead it’s an inside joke for an initiated audience. 

Posters are static, they don’t move around.  So pure artwork, photography, even well designed typographic quotes are popular.  If you’re a webcomic with hundreds or even thousands of design in your back catalog, why not use the Poster tool to sell every comic you’ve ever made without producing a single wit of inventory?  

Mousepads and Laptop Skins each have their own niche for office workers and designers. A little bit of forethought will go a long way towards creating products your fans genuinely want to own and display.

4. Beyond Logo Gear

Continuing a theme from #3, who are you?  What is your story?  What are your Merchify products telling us about you?  Simply slapping logos on everything might be saying “I just wanted a corporate swag store and took the path of least resistance.”  But if your brand really matters to you, you probably have more than just a logo already.  A mission.  A cast of characters.  A specialty.  An insight.

Take this shirt.

No simple Apple logo here, it’s a very clever depiction of their Maps application revealing the location of an Engineer, namely, IN THE SHIRT. That’s funny, clever, a story.

Successful merchandising design boils down to this. Design products carefully that make us want to belong to your team, your club, your tribe. Perhaps we already DO belong.  Then make us proud to show it with products that get people excited!

5. Adding More Thumbnails

Merchify generates dynamic photos of your custom products. But why not add more? In this short video, we show you how to quickly generate additional close ups using Photoshop Slices.

Let’s Rock

If you’re an existing Merchify customer, we thrilled to have you.   We hope these ideas have helped you think about new possibilities and we can’t wait to see what else you produce.  If you’re not a Merchify user but would like to learn more, check it out!

Thanks again and happy merching!

The team at Amplifier.

Heard of Henri, the Existentialist cat? He’s only the biggest French export since Freedom Fries. When filmmaker Will Braden created a short film about his cat, he never imagined he was launching a viral video star.  But with “Paw De Deux,” Will spawned millions of Youtube views and profiles in Huffington Post, Gawker, MSN and more.

Internet fame brought Will, er, that is, Henri, thousands of Facebook fans.  And they all wanted to know one thing.

Where can I buy Henri, Le Chat Noir Merchandise?

So Will did what any reasonable person in his position would do.  He contacted Amplifier®. After all, we’ve helped some of the Internet’s biggest viral phenomena to sell original swag to their fans.  Once Will explained his success, we gave him early access to Merchify™ and a star was born!  He went from “absolute novice” to selling thousands of dollars of merch in only a week! And the orders just keep on coming! 

UPDATE: And Will Braden’s success just keeps on coming. Just last month, Will and Henri beat thousands of others to take Grand Prize at the First Annual Internet Cat Video Film Festival. 

Félicitations Henri and Will!

Breadpig’s Trial of the Clone saga continues…  When we last spied our hero, he was autographing a small mountain of paperbacks.

In the span of 5 hours today, Zach Weiner signed the recently-arrived hardbacks. They’ll be out the door and into the hands of Kickstarter Supporters everywhere.  Congratulations to Breadpig and Zach for such a successful project.

“We need guns.  Lots of guns.”

Scene from Amplifier’s pre-high season company party at the Alamo Drafthouse. Topher Hyink and Joel Bush rapping with an off camera Dan Benjamin (5by5.)

On Thursday, October 11, Amplifier was pleased to host an Austin Startup Week presentation by Justin Jensen of Cinetics who successfully raised $486,518 via Kickstarter last year. After fulfilling that project themselves, they opened a store and have also launched a new campaign.

Justin shared all kinds of advice and lessons learned about maximizing a Kickstarter campaign. It went well. We had an overflow crowd as did most of this second installment of Austin Startup Week, which was a raging success. (Huge congrats and thanks, Jacqueline.)

After his talk, I gave a tour for about 25 folks. It’s always fun to show the shop and hear about diverse creative ventures. Walking through screen printing, on-demand production, receiving, assembly, and shipping, it’s often an eye opener for people to see firsthand the work involved to translate viral Internet explosions into physical reality.

[photo Duane Cawthron] 

Keep an eye on Cinetics. Definitely participate in next year’s Austin Startup Week. And we will see y’all again soon.