ReadyMade: Instructions for everyday life

Mondays suck. Especially if you hate your job. But the day doesn’t have to be a total waste. You can now look forward to reading about ReadyMakers who have worked their way into f*&%ing awesome jobs—and maybe find a little inspiration to jumpstart your own career in the process.

Andrew Schechter of Animal Planet talks about the glory part of his job—that’d be being the referee in the Superbowl’s cutest competitor, the Puppy Bowl—and the workaday aspects of being a production assistant, which frankly sound pretty cool, too. And he disabuses us of some of our fondest illusions: there are no roosters answering phones at the Animal Planet offices, nor chimps making copies.

VITAL STATS
Occupation: Puppy Bowl Referee/Associate Producer for Animal Planet
Location: Brooklyn, NY
Age: 25
First Job: Production Assistant for Discovery Kids
Best Job: Puppy Bowl Referee
Greatest Professional Challenge: Cleaning up puppy “fouls” of all shapes, sizes, and colors
Salary During 20s: Mid 50s

1. Hi, Andrew Schechter. How did you get that f*&%ing awesome job?
I’d like to think it was my calling to ref adorable little puppies pretending to play football but, in reality, I happened to be in the right place at the right time. Three years ago, I was at a production meeting for Puppy Bowl IV, and when the topic of “talent” came up, I jumped at the opportunity. I have a background in acting and improv, so I thought it could be fun and volunteered. At first, the room erupted in laughter (who would want to pick up dog “fouls” for 12 hours?), but once everyone thought about it, they were like, “why not?”  It’s been a match made in heaven ever since!

2. Can you tell those of us who may not know, what exactly is the Puppy Bowl?
Well, of course Super Bowl Sunday is known for the NFL game, but at Animal Planet, we recognized that some people might want another option—and so Puppy Bowl was born. Puppy Bowl is two hours of puppies pretending to play football in a miniature football stadium. Puppy players take the field every year to entertain millions of viewers with terrier tackles, fido-first downs, puppy puns and all the cuteness you can possible handle. We have a lot of elements that mimic the big game, including a starting line-up for the best puppy players, a Most Valuable Puppy award and a kitten halftime show that rivals the best Super Bowl performers. New features for this year include the Twizzlers® Blimp, which provides aerial shots of all the action thanks to its hamster pilots, and bunny rabbit cheerleaders. It’s ridiculously tongue-in-cheek, but the real message of Puppy Bowl is that pets need to be adopted. All the puppies, as well as the kittens, hamsters and rabbits, are adoptable and from no-kill shelters. There is a perfect pet for everyone at your local shelter.

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Mondays suck. Especially if you hate your job. But the day doesn’t have to be a total waste. You can now look forward to reading about ReadyMakers who have worked their way into f*&%ing awesome jobs—and maybe find a little inspiration to jumpstart your own career in the process.

Wedding photographers Jesse and Whitney Chamberlin know something about love—they’re married, for one thing—and when they shoot special events, they aim for “unique photos that capture real beauty rather than manufactured robo-photos that pasteurize originality.” Today, Jesse talks to us about the couple’s photography studio, Our Labor of Love, and their special instrument of photographic joy, the Smilebooth. (Think of the fun and spontaneity of stuffing a few of your friends into an old, black-and-white photo booth, and then imagine upping the ante with a high-quality camera lens, customizable backdrops, and best of all, standing room for even more of your buddies. Yes, it’s pretty great.)

VITAL STATS
Occupation: Photographer + Smilebooth-er
Location: Atlanta
Age: Jesse, 30 and Whitney, 35
First Job: Jesse, Librarian
Whitney, Picking up empty shells at a shooting range
Best Job: What we do now!
Greatest Professional Challenge: Trying not to overwork ourselves.
Salary During 20s: Depending on the year, anywhere from 30k to 85k

1. Hi, Jesse and Whit 
Chamberlin. How did you two  get that f*&%ing awesome job?
Well, it’s been a long road, but we both know where we want it to end…with us working for ourselves. Although Whitney had experienced some success with event production and I was laboring under the title ‘working artist,’ we weren’t exactly sure what our company should do; however one thing was clear: we would name it Our Labor of Love. We decided to stick to what we knew best, photography and production. We built a very basic website and managed to book a couple of weddings. We tried our bestest to attract customers who would let us be creative and before we knew it, OLOL exploded. We landed a crazy exhausting 40-wedding year schedule, cementing us as wedding photographers. On the side, we developed a digital photobooth we dubbed The Smilebooth. The more weddings we booked, the more The Smilebooth was used. We think The Smilebooth is so much fun, and now it’s a hit (so excited!).

2. What’s special about Our Labor of Love, and where’d you get the idea (and the great name)?
It’s one of those things where we just committed to doing photography the best way we knew how. We knew it wasn’t conventional in the wedding world, but we confidently stuck to our strengths. We continue to be intrigued by wedding dynamics, the variety, the details, the moments that happen inbetween staged photos. It’s safe to conclude we are not into the “robo-posed” wedding photos. (The Smilebooth is evidence of that.) We approach our photography not just with a photojournalist’s eye, but we express interest in “getting to know” who we are shooting; the end result is definitely a combination of what we are able to see and the clients’ personalities.

As far as the name is concerned, it was all Whitney. He had been carrying OLOL in his back pocket for a while, just waiting for his next entrepreneurial escapade. It perfectly suited and summed up our life’s work; there was never a debate.

3. How did you get started working in photography?
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Read on to find out how an academic “experiment in tactile wayfinding” accidentally gave rise to “the ultimate wedding present” (that would be Soft-Maps, irresistible to-scale maps of cities and neighborhoods quilted onto blankets and pillows), and turrned Emily Fischer from an out-of-work architect to a successful small business owner in very short order.

VITAL STATS
Name: Emily Fischer
Occupation: Haptician
Location: Brooklyn
Age: 30
First Job: Operator, Fibrex granulator at Andersen Window Corp. It was a giant machine full of rotating knives that would recycle culled window parts from an extrusion line…it had an exciting pictograph illustrating what would happen to you if you were to fall into the hopper of the machine.
Best Job: Barista, Victory Cafe in Brooklyn
Greatest Professional Challenge: Work/life balance
Salary During 20s: Too pathetic to disclose

1. Hi, Emily Fischer. How did you get that f*&%ing awesome job?
After being laid off in April of this year I spent an extremely intense two-week period of time reconnecting with my old interests. Kite making, cartography and GIS data, fractal geometry, quilts, large-scale installation art…you name it. I won second place in a kite design competition, posted an Instructable on how to make that kite, bloggers found my website and picked up on what I was then calling “Soft-Maps”…and within one month of losing my job I had accidentally founded my own company.

2. What’s special about Haptic Labs, and where’d you get the idea (and the great name)?
While at the FlyNY kite competition, I blanched when handed a registration form that required my entry to state “company name.” I scribbled down “Haptic Lab,” a name derived from my thesis project. The word “haptic” refers to the sense of touch—a grossly underutilized aspect of design. Haptic Lab is really about promoting embodiment by creating products and spaces that encourage people to interact with their environment in a physical way.  I consider my work to be part of the slow design movement.

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Greg Henderson and his partner, Joseph Massa, left successful careers on Wall Street to chase a crazy dream: opening a boutique hotel known for ’60s and ’70s space-age decor in an old motel building in the Catskill region of upstate New York—an area not exactly known for its edginess. Now in the midst of their second expansion, they’re so glad they did.

VITAL STATS
Name: Greg Henderson
Occupation: Hotelier, co-owner of the Roxbury Motel
Location: Roxbury, NY in the Catskill Mountain region of New York State
Age: 45
First Job: Babysitting some brats down the street who would punch me in the nose because they knew it would bleed easily
Best Job: What I’m doing right now! Touring the country doing my own one-man show for five years was pretty darn exciting as well, but everything looks better in hindsight. If I really put myself in the same place that I was back then, I would never want to go back to the anxiety and fear involved with never knowing where my next meal was coming from. Owning and operating The Roxbury gives me the best of both worlds. It’s just like theater in that we have cool sets, a “fantasy” world that is created by our whimsical design, a receptive audience, and the occasional standing ovation from extremely satisfied guests.
Greatest Professional Challenge: Having the guts to leave a lucrative job on Wall Street to open a crazy boutique hotel in a very rural area full of “antiquey doily” B&B’s.
Salary During 20s: $25,000/yr

1. Hi, Greg Henderson. How did you get that f*&%ing awesome job?
Whew! How do I put all of it into words? I guess you could say that everything in my life up until opening The Roxbury “brought” me here. I got a degree in business from Georgetown University in the 80’s, majoring in International Management and Marketing. But the thought of being what I thought at the time as “just a businessman” for the rest of my life petrified me, so I pursued my real passion in the theater and moved to New York City, where I received a degree in acting from The American Academy of Dramatic Arts. I was a working actor for 10 years, the last five years of which I toured in a one-man show which played 14 different cities. While acting, I met my life partner who was the artistic director of a theater company in NYC. We built and painted the sets, wrote the plays, acted and directed in them, and provided the marketing and PR for them. I started panicking, though, in my mid-30’s that I would never be able to afford basics like health insurance and decent food, so I allowed myself to get sucked into the world of money through a temp job that turned into big bucks. Within two years I was a vice president on Wall Street, asking myself how I got there and what had happened to all of the creativity and passion. With the newfound wealth we bought a small weekend home in the Catskills and fell in love with the beauty of the area. Then after five years on Wall Street I realized that I had to find a way out or, well, uhm, die…  My partner Joseph and I missed the struggling years of “creating beauty” on the stage, so we started looking for what we could do.  We realized that if we sold our Manhattan apartment we would have just enough money to open some kind of small business in the Catskills where the mortgage on our weekend home was quite small. A friend told us about a run-down roadside motel that was for sale so we went and looked at it and the rest is history. It took a year after that to “take the plunge” and move upstate and then a year of renovations to the motel. Daily anxiety attacks as well. Will the people come?  Will we lose everything and go bankrupt? But the people did come and (knock on wood) still do. We’re now on our second expansion.

2. What’s distinctive about the Roxbury, and where’d you get the idea?
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Mondays suck. Especially if you hate your job. But the day doesn’t have to be a total waste. You can now look forward to reading about ReadyMakers who have worked their way into f*&%ing awesome jobs—and maybe find a little inspiration to jumpstart your own career in the process—right here, every Monday.

Have you ever wondered how to start a letterpress print shop? Vivian Leung did it, launching her design/print business 9SpotMonk in an apartment in Hoboken. (That’s her above left, with sister and business partner Tiffany.) Eight years later, she attests that growing your own creative business is possible, if you’ve got a head for research—and a stomach for lots of hard work.

VITAL STATS
Occupation: Designer, Printer and Founder of 9SpotMonk Design
Location: Glen Rock, NJ
Age: Oi. 36.
First Job: First job was in college, worked at a small women owned children’s book store in the town where I lived. My commute was a block from my house. I recommended and sold books, wrapped gifts and vacuumed the floor at the end of the day. I only worked Saturdays. Mostly it was me and the owner and for the holidays, both owners were there. I had no idea about children’s books but I learned fast. Sales (still) was not my forte. Parents would want recommendations and then they’d say ‘no’ and pick out their own stuff. I ended up manning the register mostly and that meant wrapping a lot of gifts and making baskets for birthday kids. That I loved and eventually became the go-to person to create baskets and wrap stuff. I ended up doing their window displays long after I stopped working there. I think it’s also there that I picked up my obssession with children’s books. My kids have over 300 books and neither of them can read yet.
Best Job: The two I have now—running 9SpotMonk with my sister Tiffany and being a mother to two kids aged 5 and 3.
Greatest Professional Challenge: Knowing when to stop working. It’s terribly hard to separate my personal time and work time. After 5 years, I am still working on that.
Salary During 20s: Ranged from $7.00/hour at the bookshop and my last corporate job (acd at advertising agency) $115k.

1. Hi, Vivian Leung. How did you get that f*&%ing awesome job?
It was late 2001, and I had just come back from my honeymoon and my interactive department at the ad agency shut down due to the internet bust. Sat at home for about a week figuring out next steps and then registered my business name, 9SpotMonk Design, without knowing exactly what I was going to do. So for the next three years, 9SpotMonk was a design studio doing interactive and print design projects. Then I was asked to design a wedding invitation and I thought, “wouldn’t it be great if I could produce what I created as well?” So a month of research brought me to letterpress, which I’m a little embarrassed to say I had heard nothing about until that point. I needed machinery that I could have in our tiny Hoboken apartment. I drove up to Chicopee, Maschussetts with my grandmother (the only one who would hang with me on that Saturday) and brought back my first piece of letterpress history, a 6 by 10 Craftsman tabletop press. I got a couple of books in hand and taught myself how to use the press. It was an interesting time. I found out how awesome letterpress was and in a few months got another press, and then another. My husband, little 8 month old daughter and I moved out of Hoboken to the ‘burbs and then the big monsters came: two Heidelberg Windmills, two Vandercook SP-15’s and an electric cutter. And that’s how 9SpotMonk Letterpress started.

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