The Partridge family had five kids, Party of Five was, well, a party of five. So I got thinking - maybe another hauler in addition to the family of four would mean more 'Gus' time. Being the face and brains behind a brand is by all means hard work - but, hey, surely some sort of assistant for me would make life a little easier...

The task was at hand, team haul needed to find a suitable candidate; capable of thinking on their feet (Bear Grylls or similar), a multitasking genius (preferable previous experience as a juggler or hula hoop artist) and gets on swimmingly with staff and customers, in particular the most handsome of them all, brand ambassador aka myself, Gus...

After hours and hours of strenuous interviews, survival skills test, choose your own adventure role plays and some serious rock, paper scissors action, we decided on a suitable addition to team haul. I would like to introduce you to haul's newest member, Sarah.

Sarah is a Scorpio, she counts Pina Colada's, ELO and Magnum PI among here interests and has an incredible knack for reciting David Bowie part as 'Jareth the Goblin King'/The Labyrinth.

Sarah will be managing my media appearances, modeling contracts, social engagements, blog updates and tweets.

Welcome aboard Sarah

		Our man Gus made a late run in the 2010 Federal election for the seat of Melbourne. He's eagerly awaiting a call from Antony Green for confirmation he has the preferences to become the first dog in the House of Reps. His platform caused some controversy on Fbook.

A couple of weeks back we shot a video for Australia Post's new Click 'n Send service for small businesses. Our bit was to babble on about how we're using the platform to ship iPad cases and macBook sleeves all over the planet, but that's not what i'm writing this post about.

The crew from CodeNameMax ventured out to haul with their director's chairs and gaffer tape and by mid morning an interesting bit of trivia emerged from the crew. The cameraman on the shoot was Matt Whitehurst and as it turns out sitting in the wings giving wise 'ol owl advice was Dangerous Don Whitehurst. Who? you may ask. Well Don was been shooting stuff for 40 years, news for the ABC, current affairs, sporting events and the like. Don shot a piece of legendary footage from Australian rock 'n roll history. Does a few mangy looking boys with loud guitars riding on the back of a truck down Swanston street in Melbourne ring any bells ? They were relatively unknown back then, but went on to become the most successful rock act in the world. A little band call ACDC & I"m talking about the Long Way To The Top film clip. You can see Don's famous piece of footage here We're not worthy! That's Don in the white cap trying to tell Scott how to hold the iPad sleeve. Oh yeah, the Aust Post shoot went well and you'll hear more about that in the coming weeks. Scott blew it, he should have worn the tight black t-shirt.

Sometimes I wonder how google really works. I have several friends who are SEO specialists and over the years have spent some time and coin on attempting to improve our rankings in the search engines for various phrases.
Then sometimes without any effort stuff like this happens. If you searched for "ipad melbourne" and i think "ipad store melbourne" in June and July, haul ranked numero uno. Since the iPad launched in Australia in early June we started getting calls to the haul store from punters wanting to know if we had iPads in stock. After a couple of days of head scratching at our end, one of the callers explained exactly how he'd found us.  We explained we make iPad cases, not ipads. Disappointed callers would then ask if we knew who had any iPads left in stock. This happened about 3 times a day, every day.
The call went out. Maybe we should sell iPads..... nah we'll stick to our knitting.

We launched our iPad case range, expecting it to do well.
Not expecting it to explode. Product launches are funny things.
Let me digress.
We were a bit late to the market (we missed the US launch completely whist tweaking designs) this inadvertently created a bit of pre-buzz. Just managed to get the sleeves & folios 'up' in our online & North Ftizroy store the day of the Australian release.
They didn't exactly burst out of the gates, it was more trickle than a BP style gusher for the first week. A couple of early customers video'd reviews and wrote some nice things and we gained some momentum.
We started getting strange phone calls from punters actually wanting iPads and then we figured out why.
A friendly neighbourhood journo manoeuvred the iPad sleeves into the Sunday Age 'M' mag Object of Desire... (the irony of being featured in a newspaper with a cover for a product that is supposed to be the newspaper 'killer' was not lost on many).






IPad Daily out of Portland and Macworld mag reviewed the cases and we were off and running. Punters started tweeting gushy stuff and pics of their sleeves & folios in the wild. Since then it's been all hands on the North Fitzroy production deck to keep making and uploading new batches.  We'll start wholesaling again soon.
Stay tuned & send us a shot with your case out in the jungle.

We were a little late to market & a little under prepared for the demand for iPad and accessories to protect them. In one word WOW.

The haul range has two styles: sleeve & folio. Both are made from upcycled rubber print blankets and lined with felt, fluro orange & pink felt. The ipad sleeves and folios [or cases if you are an Americano]  have received some good early reviews from punters who grabbed the first batch. 
This is the process we go through to make them. As with all haul products they are made in Melbourne Australia [not Florida].
Over the next few weeks, we'll be launching a third range of ipad sleeve / cases made from recycled billboard vinyl, lined with with neoprene.
Stay tuned.






See the full range here.

Our first stockist in Singapore, the freshly minted design store Cumulus opened last week. Congratulations to Irwin Lim and his team on their new Orchard Rd store. Cumulus stocks our recycled print blanket, truck inner tube and billboard ranges. It's a slick joint, go check it out.
http://www.cumulus.sg

Maybe one of the haulers were too 'tired and emotional' to remember to put the sleeve prototypes back in their messenger bag.  Maybe they had their drink spiked. Maybe it was the dog after all.
Anyway they're out.


The ipad will launch June 8 [we're a little bit slow down here]. To start with we'll have a couple of versions, one made from recycled vinyl advertising billboards and lined with neoprene, the second -something like what you see here- will be recycled rubber print blankets, felt lined. If you want to keep updated on the prototyping & sampling process sign up here. Oh and spread the word.