Reilly Brennan

Personalized Thank You Note Culture

Andrea received an order from J.Crew and inside we were surprised to find this correspondence card from CEO Mickey Drexler. I like that it’s not really on J.Crew stationery, but rather like a personal note from the man himself.

The Lowly Receipt, An Opportunity

Point-of-sale receipts are meaningless and will probably go the way of our protoborg pocketdevices. Which is why they are so amazing when they are done well. And an opportunity. 

It struck me again when Andrea and I finally made it over to Outerlands for lunch. We arrived just as they opened at 11:00 am and grabbed a little seat outside along 45th Avenue, catching a good 20 minutes of sun before it moved overhead. When Andrea came outside after ordering and showed me the receipt, it made me smile. They only did so much as put their winged mascot on top, but the way the point-of-sale’s line returns printed a bird with IBM stripes, it became a little more distinguished. Later when I got home I wondered about the lives of all those receipts I collect, scraps of recordkeeping that usually end up crumpled in my pocket, transferred to my bedside table and eventually ripped into a hundred little pieces. They are sitting ducks for improvement.

As it turns out, there are some receipts to be celebrated. Below are some of the more interesting examples I’ve seen online, repurposed here as a sort of thumbtack wall to inspire someone down the line. I liked some of the ideas found within Berg’s adventurous and creative redo of the common receipt, but as a whole consider it a little too precious — like something out of an overpriced cupcake shop.

Examples:

Burgerville: Nutritional information for each item (from rynosoft)

Barnes & Noble: Recommended similar purchases (from Travelin’ Librarian)

BP: A Vulcan salute

Nirvana: Hand-drawn cartoons for customers by Brent-Dawg (from MetaGrrrl)

China Cafe: Native characters alongside English text

Loehmann’s: Reiterating perceived value (from thisgirlangie)

Taxicab: A peaceful reminder (from EvilChick)

McDonald’s: Subtle but powerful branding (from Alexweb8, who has a thing for collecting receipts from various point-of-sale machines)

Harvard metalab project: QR codes, quotes (from neutralSurface)

ZEF: receipt as business card (from pointclickenjoy) (UPDATE: mmcgown comes in with this tidbit about our man ZEF: “If you didn’t do it earlier, go here http://zef.so/employable/ and take a look at Zef’s CV. It’s quite imaginative and, not surprisingly, snagged him employment.” Sound on, trust us.) 

Maybe Warhol knew what he was doing after all.

Brass Buttons from Waterbury

“Since 1812, we’ve crafted the world’s most popular metal buttons. When Gen. Ulysses S. Grant met Gen. Robert E. Lee at Appomattox Courthouse, both men wore Waterbury buttons on their chests.”

I’ve probably spent a full hour over the last six months trolling the archives of Waterbury Button, the pre-eminent button maker and the only Civil War-era button manufacturer still in business. The buttons are all made in Connecticut (although no longer in Waterbury — they moved to nearby Chesire) and are found on jackets on sale at Brooks Brothers, Tommy Hilfiger and found fastening all types of U.S. military garb.

Below are some of my favorite buttons from their archive.

See more at Waterbury Button Co.

Signs and mahl sticks

I’ve never seen a sign painter doing his work, so when I walked into NEST in Pacific Heights a few weeks back I was excited to see Scott Thiessen putting on their new window lettering, all by hand. The shop owners probably weren’t enthusiastic about me interrupting him with my inane questions. Actually, Scott probably wasn’t too excited about it either. But he was gracious enough to answer a few questions from me and let me take this photograph.

I was fascinated by the stick he was holding and had never seen anything like it; I actually asked him if it was a pool queue. It’s called a mahl stick and is used by painters when doing fine detail work, preventing them from smudging the surrounding work and providing a brace of sorts. The end you can’t see is wrapped in a soft round pad so it doesn’t scratch the glass.

Scott’s amazing work is for hire, at New Bohemia Signs.