Thursday I ran over to Staples to hunt for some laser printer-friendly adhesive labels that would be suitable for bar codes that I can stick on the single tubes of my dragon beard candy so that retailers, like Uwajimaya, can scan them. The gift boxes all have pre-printed bar codes, so that wasn't an issue, but, alas, there are almost 1200 small tubes for individual retail sale that lack these essentials. So this weekend, in the sweltering heat of my apartment, I printed out appropriate bar codes and stuck them on to about 364 packages, which made it possible for me to deliver the single tubes to Uwajimaya Beaverton and Seattle.
On Friday I got agreement from two other stores to carry the candy. I will most likely be doing sampling at Viet Wah next weekend, and I have sampling plans for the next few weeks at Uwajimaya Bellevue, Seattle, and Beaverton.
I made a little delivery at the Beaverton Uwajimaya and met with the new grocery manager and his assistant. Not entirely surprisingly, since I knew this was a vendor sampling day, I ran into Eugene Levy, who was showing off his green tea, today in the form of iced genmaicha. I chatted with him a bit before meeting with the Uwajimaya staff and we had a simple dinner at the little Japanese restaurant bordering the store. It was probably around 90 degrees Fahrenheit, so I ate hiya-yakko (cold tofu).
I needed something of a weekend, so I didn't do any work today until afternoon, when I made a delivery of the now-barcoded impulse-buy tubes to Uwajimaya. Tomorrow I need to make another trip to Chinatown to meet up with another store there.
Things are kind of picking up... I still have to do a lot of sales work this week, so I hope I can take care of everything else that comes up.