Richard Flynn :: no comment

I think it was Lucy Dollard, the Producer for Theatrical Theatrics Productions who came up with the suggestion. Our play for 2005 is Tom Stoppard’s Rough Crossing, so why not build on the title by advertising the production at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe using custom-printed sick-bags?

The idea was a good one. There are over a thousand productions going on in Edinburgh in the festival period in August, and just about all of them to a man are trying to stand out in their self-advertisement on the Royal Mile. Most people lump with fliers, and this is what we did in 2004. We hadn’t done too badly then, selling out every day, but this year we had to sell a hundred seats per show, more than twice what we had had last year. So, I set about trying to find out how to get sick-bags (motion-sickness bags, vomit-bags, call them what you will) printed to specification. We needed 10,000, and we’d need them in Edinburgh in the second week of August. At this time it was early May.

My first port of call, of course, was Google.

In the course of my search I stumbled across the site Bagophily, whose owner, Paul Mundy, is a sick-bag collector. His site showcases his collection of sick-bags from many airlines and many eras. He charts a progression in designs, both simple and complex. I amused myself browsing the collection for a few minutes (OK, shoot me, I added it to my bookmarks…) before getting onto the most useful page for my purpose, which lists sick-bag manufacturers. I looked down the list for manufacturers based in the UK, and picked out Horsleys, a company based in Reading who supply all sorts of things to airlines. I fired off an email to the address on the website and went to bed, glad to have made a start.

The following day, while working in the Bodleian library, I received the following reply:

Thank you very much for your e-mail enquiry for Horsleys Airsickness Bags.

We can do everything you require but the bad news is that the minimum requirement for print runs are 250,000 bags.

You will have this problem no matter who you approach. We have had this type of request in the past. The general solution that we suggest is that you purchase a standard white bag and then have sticky labels made up with the required design and stick these on the bags. The standard white bag measures 120 mm. wide, 240 mm. high and a side gusset of 60 mm. To purchase 10,000 bags would cost £35:00 per 1,000 plus V.A.T. They are available from stock so we can offer a speedy delivery.

Now, I really don’t know what we would have done with quarter of a million sick-bags—we certainly wouldn’t have been able to hand them all out in Edinburgh, even if we had been pounding the street for every moment of daylight we were there during the Festival. Also, the idea of sticking on 20,000 sticky labels (one front, one back for 10,000 bags) didn’t really encourage me. It would probably end up looking quite amateurish (as in, more amateurish than we actually are), with some labels being completely askew, not to mention the boring task of sitting down and sticking them on. So, I decided to pursue my original idea of having the bags printed to our specification.

To be honest, I had sort of expected to get responses like this one—companies that supply airlines and shipping lines are unlikely to be interested in small fry like us.

At this point, I decided to take the plunge, and post my first post on a forum that I had been reading, FlyerTalk, which is a very active forum primarily about airline frequent-flier schemes, but many of the individual boards have a very wide aviation-related collective knowledge. As you can see if you look at the post itself, the first reply was from someone whose screen name is House, who suggested I get in touch with the Design Museum in Ghent (in Belgium). At that time they were having an exhibition called ‘Airworld’, which they had advertised by distributing sick-bags. So, I fired an email off to them to ask how they’d done it.

The museum’s reply came back just over a week later. The reply briefly gave the details of their supplier, Duni, which is a company with offices in many countries all over the world: they’d dealt with the Belgian office, and had given me the name of their contact. I decided to email the head office in Sweden, mentioning how I’d been put in touch with them.

The reply from Duni came back a week later. After thanking me for my email, I was informed,

Unfortunately we have to inform you that we do not produce such a small amount of air sickness bags.

So, that was that. They suggested that I should get in touch with the Swiss company which actually makes the sick-bags, ELAG Verpackungen. However, I never did—I didn't even really look at their website—because I was getting a bit disgruntled at being referred to all these separate companies, and I also really needed to prepare for my exams.

Therefore, I resigned myself and the others on the acting Company’s Management Committee to the fact that we would have to print plain old fliers again this year for our production.

I took my exams and went home. On 30th June, I had a slightly confusing email from a lady called Sandra at Deutsche Kard-O-Pak. The email read as follows:

I feel very sorry that we have not answered your inquiry so far. Unfortunately it got lost between some papers and today I found it when I was putting the papers into the corresponding folders.

I hope you accept my apology for loosing your inquiry.

Can we still be of assistance? I hope so and would be pleased to send you the requested information.

Now, this email was confusing because I had never sent an email to anyone at Kard-O-Pak: I could only guess that someone, probably the people at Duni, had emailed them on my behalf. This was interesting, so I fired a reply off within a few hours of receiving Sandra's message. I said that we only needed 10,000 bags, but that we’d need them fairly soon and that we’d need them delivered to Edinburgh. Yes, the reply came back, they could do that, the bags could be printed in anything up to four colours (i.e. full colour), on all five sides (front, back, gussets, bottom). They’d enclosed quotations for our quantity, which varied depending on how many colours our design would be. The design had to be simple—all of this seemed absolutely fine, especially since we’d been planning an illustrated design.

One snag—“At present you should consider a delivery end of August.” Hmm, really not what we wanted at all. I bashed out a reply saying that we were interested, but only if they could deliver by the second week of August. Sandra sent her reply:

I checked the production plan again. Fortunately we had some changes in the schedules yesterday afternoon. So I think we can produce your order between two other orders. Due to the small quantity it will take less than one day to produce your order so that the following productions will only be postponed by one day. Then we can keep all other delivery dates.

However, that means that we have to have your approved artwork on 13th July at the latest. I.e. we need your artwork on 6th July at the very latest so that we can do the necessary work here to prepare the printing data of which you will receive a PDF for approval. Do you think this is possible?

This would enable us to dispatch the bags in week of 1st August (mid to end of the week).

Wow! It looked like they were eager for our petty business! Now, we were all ready to go, except for one problem. We didn’t yet have any definite designs. I was getting a bit anxioius, as you might imagine—here was the chance of that dreamt-for advertising coup of the sick-bags.

And so, with a heavy heart I had to reply that we couldn’t meet that artwork deadline, and so we wouldn’t be able to go ahead with our order. I expected that to be that, and it was pretty much, except for the fact that Sandra came back with another email:

I do very much regret this. The 6th was the very latest possible date. For every day later I cannot guarantee that the bags will arrive in time. Furthermore, the production dates for other customers would be at risk.

You do not have to apologize for anything. It would have been a pleasure for us to work with you for such an interesting project.

Maybe one day in the future we can intensify cooperation.

I too hope that we might be able to ‘intensify cooperation’—now we just need to find a play with an aviation or nautical theme to produce for next year!