As mentioned below, much of the year has been taken up with the generation of the Red Wing Creative Economy report.

Related, and even more of a time sink, has been the initiation of the Red Wing Innovation Incubator.

This is a physical space dedicated to help grow and mentor new businesses in the Red Wing Community.

This activity is being driven by Red Wing Downtown Main Street and our involvement is because of a firm belief that the stronger the local economy is, the stronger our business can become.

Visit the web site and see what the hub-bub is all about. Red Wing Innovation Incubator.

It has been busier here than it might appear.

Earlier this year, we became involved in a project to try and measure the local Creative Economy and contrast it to other communities. Armed with this information, the goal becomes to make defensible recommendations going forward.

This is important to our business for obvious reasons, but it is also important to the community because this is where the economy is growing very rapidly.

We couldn't (or even shouldn't) do a significant project like this alone. We partnered with the Southern Minnesota Initiative Foundation, Red Wing Downtown Main Street, Inc., Anderson Center at Tower View, Red Wing Arts Association, ArtReach and the Sheldon Theatre of Performing Arts.

This is good company to keep and adds credibility to the final report.

We are proud of the final report and encourage you to download your own copy.

We have been very busy re-inventing here at the shop.

To begin with, we have been very focused on slowly unveiling Red Wing Digital. Red Wing Digital is a print-on-demand product that provides unique large-format presentation products, namely the Panel Print and the Acrylic Print. The Acrylic Print is slowly getting ready for production, but it has taken longer than hoped.

Secondly, we have a new business partner. Fine Art Prints on Demand is a United Kingdom company. This is a side of the business (printing and framing fulfillment) we have been quietly working and growing for a number of years. FAPoD is our third customer for this side of the business.

These two developments have driven our third initiative. We are moving our production to a larger facility. We have narrowed our options down and expect to be able to make some final decisions shortly.

It has almost been six months to the day that this blog has been updated. This is inexcusable and consequently here are the excuses;

1) It has been very, very busy at the shop. The crush began in August (the last blog posting) and has been unrelenting ever since. The simple solution would be to hire additional help to manage the workload and to some degree that was the solution. But as a business survivor of 2008 (remember Lehman Brothers?), you learn not to trust short term business trends. So you suck it up, put in long hours and satisfy each and every customer.

2) Contributing to this work crush has been the success of the new products at RedWingDigital.com. This is a new business model for us and it takes time to hammer out a smooth workflow. But if it were easy, everybody would be doing it. Look for new products soon.

3) It is supposed to be quiet in January so we closed the shop for ten days and took a long road trip to the most remote part of the United States that we could find. However, this January was the busiest January ever even with ten days removed from the calendar. It isn't fair to have a customer wait for my vacation, so it meant even longer days once we returned.

4) This stuff doesn't write itself, especially when you are tired and have convinced yourself you have writer's block.

That being said, I promise not to allow that kind of break in the blog pattern to ever occur again.