Sorry for the crappy cell phone pic. Click for a larger, even more blurry version.

A little more progress with the bakery this week. We have most of the retail shelving built, the bakery case is getting a fresh coat of paint, and our shiny new double stack oven was delivered! (Nope, still no water/toilet… sigh). But I’ve been up late the past few nights working on getting our photo label pipeline up and running. You, see, the Mr. Stanley Pinkerton has invited us to his house tonight and his owner sent this photo as a part of the invitation:

There's no arguing Mr. Pinkerton's photogenic qualities.

I saw this as a great oppotunity to get going on how our automagic label system is going to actually work out. The resulting bags you see above still aren’t quite the final design, but it’s darn close. The neat thing is they were generated from a database that stuck the photo, dog’s information, and flavor information on to the label template design. So when you upload your photo through our store website (coming soon!), you pay a single, one time fee and it will be saved forever. When you order treats with that photo on it, it will get stuck in this fancy pants database thingy I’m talking about and the label will get generated when we process your order. That’s why we are able to offer photo treat labels with super fast turnaround and no extra charge. Pretty snazzy huh?

View from the production area. Click to enlarge

I spent Wednesday, Thursday and Friday scraping the floors and spreading leveling compound in preparation of laying the new floors down.  Despite how dirty and tired we were, we got excited on Friday afternoon and started putting the floor down. We stopped about 1/3rd of the way through. Tracy is a college football fanatic, so we took Saturday off to rest our bones and cheer on the Nebraska Cornhuskers (They won… GO BIG RED!).

Can you believe this isn't real wood? Click to enlarge

We got a lazy late start Sunday but powered through to get all of the flooring down. It was really important that we finished since we’ll be receiving delivery of several shelving units on Monday! We should start getting some equipment in this week as well. Heck, we may even have running water some time soon. The big empty check boxes that scare me from a scheduling standpoint will be electrical wiring and building out the counter space. We’re on track for a mid-November opening, so stay tuned!

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

We’re still here and moving forward! As per our plan,  we spent the week figuring our a flooring solution. Since calm, submissive dogs on short leashes will be welcomed into our store, we wanted to make sure we have a floor that could handle the occasional accident. But we also wanted to get something interesing looking and durable as well. We had it narrowed down to a concrete refinishing or vinyl plank flooring. Vinyl plank is something we had never heard of. It’s somewhat like laminate wood floors. But this flooring is has no wood, has more texture, and 100% waterproof. The folks at Grand Strand Floors were very laid back and great to work with. We should have our flooring next week.

While we wait for the floors, Tracy is getting our baking equipment ordered (which is the next step in the plan). I’m mostly working on the online portion of the website that will allow customers to easily order treats and upload their photos to put on their packages. We’ve also been brainstorming on some new doggie treat recipes.

Oh yeah! Plus we got our phone line and DSL internet hooked up. But most importantly, we should have water service sometime next week. I think it’s pretty funny we got Internet access before we have a working toilet!

Before we move on to the store update, you should note that this entry is also our very first podcast! I’ve been wanting to do a podcast for a very long time, but didn’t really have a great reason to do it. Then it hit me that it would really add a lot to The Baker’s Dog website. It turns out that taking the video was the easy part. It was all of the editing, learning, copying, pasting, and waiting to get it out on the Internet that made it harder! I don’t think we’ll podcast on a regular schedule and it won’t always be video. So be sure to subscribe (RSS or iTunes) and you’ll be updated automatically! Without further delay, here’s the video I slaved over that I hope you really like:

Baker’s Dog Podcast: In Living Color from The Baker’s Dog on Vimeo.

Since we don’t have a money tree, and given these uncertain economic times, we’re trying to control costs where it makes the most sense (cents?). Therefore we decided to paint the store ourselves. The only hesitation in our decision was considering that a few walls are as high as 25′. We looked into ladders and scaffolding before I ultimately decided we should rent a scissor lift for speed and safety. (The fact it has an actual joystick and makes “robot noises” may have had something to do with it. But whatever.) I picked up a 19′ scissor lift from the local equipment rental place and little did we know how wobbly the lift gets at that height! It was really scary until we took a couple of rides to get our bearings. On the first day, we put a coat of “new construction” primer on all of the walls. This type of primer is super thick- it’s basically thinned out plaster. We were exhausted by the end of the night.

The next day, we got the colors on and the thinner interior latex went much quicker (though not quite as fast as in the video). The overall the paint job is a decent one. But I think we’ll stick to making deliciously healthy pet treats. We chose a neutral gray for the front half of the store and a pumpkin orange for the back half. I gotta’ admit, the impact of the orange when standing at the front door is pretty cool. We picked orange because it has a decidedly modern feel when it’s beside the gray foreground. Plus, we figured orange can be a fall color when it’s coupled with brown accents or a beachy summer color when coupled with electric blue and yellow.

We decided to go ahead an keep the scissor lift for a full week to clean up the lights, do some finish work around the windows, and clean the glass. The following day, we did some touch up while our amazing new little printer was installed. It’s really hard to explain how the printer actually cuts the stickers out, so I grabbed some video of that as well. We’re going to experiment with quality settings and the material we print on so we get the best looking and easiest to apply labels we can.

The feedback and reaction we’ve been getting on the packaging has been nothing short of amazing. It just gets me pumped up even more to get things going ASAP! Now, I need to get hopping on the website side of things so you fine folks can upload your photos with no muss or fuss. If you’re a subscriber to the website, you’ll probably be asked to help us test things out before we go fully live. You and your dogs be rewarded for your efforts!

[podcast format="video"]http://bakersdog.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/the-bakers-dog-podcast.mp4[/podcast]
Also on YouTube.