Sandwiches

Since it's Friday, why not a little more catalog content from Horsehead Crating Company? We'll leave the narrative out, mostly. The Tillman boys are barely literate, so the fewer words the better.

Just so you know we're not lying: a combined view of three actual catalog pages from our upcoming Spring 2011 catalog. Some old content and old products and some new. The drafts are still rough and not all of the new products have been built—all in due time. We're thinking, maybe, we'll just run small batches, printing and binding them ourselves, instead of dropping a grip of cash on something that'll be out of date in next-to-no time. That way we can just add new pages and update content as need be. Why are we declaring this on our blog? Who knows? Sometimes it helps to give these possibly half-baked ideas a little time to cool on the windowsill before plunging them back into the oven.

We've got a soft spot for Brooklyn (one of us having spent some formative time there) and this fine shot from the fine borough of a pair of Roadrunner shoefiti will likely make the cut for the new catalog. By the way, the catalog will actually have straight-up catalog content. But we don't want it to just get tossed directly from the mail into the recycling bin—hence the extraneous, Tillman bits. Those boys have more fun than we do anyway (and they've got way more flavor) so we figured we'd borrow some of their style to help sell our goods. What the hell, it's worth a shot. Plus, since they're designing the catalog pretty much for free (terms are still under negotiation) we more or less have to let a little authentic Tillman sneak in. This shot was taken, and the Roadrunners were chucked, by Gallante Tilman. Another Tillman with a fine eye and proper skills for making mischief.

Hardly new content, perhaps, but a new look at an old scene from the Armadillo Product Testing video the Tillmans of Horsehead Crating orchestrated on our behalf a while back. Here, some fools we know (and some fools we are) chucked the table into the South Platte, evidently testing some key attribute (it's sinkability, we think). River lovers fret not: the table was on a tether and it was hoisted back out as soon as it went in. All in the name of good fun and what passes for marketing around here (at least until the new Sheriff of Marketing came on board). Clovis and Darnell are working on the copy to accompany this photo now and, in all honesty, the early drafts err on the side of the nonsensical and the ridiculous. Bet you can't wait to get yours.

Clovis and Darnell Tillman from Horsehead Crating Company have been heads down over the past week working on the new catalog, or at least that's what they say they've been doing as the uncrated furniture starts to pile up around here. They're back at the crate building today, so no worries if you've placed an order and are awaiting delivery. All will be on time, as always. Meantime, enjoy this week of catalog-preview posts, starting today with the cover image—a close-up of the brand from cousin Millard Tillman's famous DoubleButter Burritos. We're told the recipe, or what passes for a recipe in a Tillman kitchen, will be offered up on the back of the catalog. Worth the price of the catalog (free) all by itself.

So here's what happens when you tell a Tillman (or a pair of Tillmen in this case: Clovis and Darnell) to style a piece of furniture or two in a setting, as if someone were living in a space and using the piece. Instead of finding a sweet pad with nice natural light and interesting art and accessories and staging a shot professional-furniture-catalog style, they give us this nonsense. Apparently, some dude in beaten-up boots has been sharpening his chainsaw blade (with a file, no less) and doing a bit of branding. A typical afternoon for a Tillman, perhaps, except of course there's no alcohol in the scene and the chainsaw isn't running. By the way, if this photograph somehow snuck its way into a mailer from our new Sales and Marketing Kingpin, we apologize for the unsolicited randomness (sort of).

All this new product design work and prototyping and what have you got us looking critically at some of the pieces in the production catalog and set us a-tinkering. Today, the look of our Crane stool, here in bar height, mid tinker. We're considering chopping down the backrest to make it more of a backstop, bringing the back slightly more upright (returning to the angle of the first Crane stool prototype we've kept around the office) and tightening the whole thing up with our new tooling. One of these three will probably win out—we're just not sure which one yet. You got an opinion? Shoot us a note with a vote.

As we build new pieces for the new catalog, we're also retooling the shop to more efficiently, and repeatably, build the oldies and the goodies. And they get no goodier than the Roadrunner bench, currently marooned in the back catalog section of the site but more than ready for a reintroduction. We want this to be the Denver bench—on every corner, in front of every municipal building, at every bus stop. How are we going to pull that off? We're working on it.