Graffiti as advertising

Eddie, Andy, Michael and I went out to Arrk Dison this afternoon in southwest Shanghai to check out the 24 cosmetic models for a cell phone project. Arrk Dison is one of our major prototyping houses out here in Shanghai and certainly the main prototyping house for our most important cosmetic models.

It took us 45 minutes to get to the outskirts of Shanghai (somewhere between SongJiang and MinHang). In the middle of a more industrial area – Arrk Dison is sandwiched between an electronics factory and a fashion clothing factory, go figure. I came upon graffiti phone numbers liberally scattered on the walls of buildings and thought to myself, is everyone in Shanghai looking for a date?? Eddie explained to me that these are actually ‘advertisements’ by local people and companies. One graffiti number was for a truck driver. Another was for Arrk Dison’s prototyping services no doubt.

Arrk Dison just moved to a newly minted building. For the cosmetic models, they have a team of ten people each with their own desk and their own tools doing the ‘hand work’. At first glance, both Michael and I didn’t think the set up looked entirely professional, but these guys are bright and very much on top of their work. With 18 CNC machines and a space marked out for another 36, Arrk Dison is expanding like mad. We were all glad to be there today since with 2 sets of 12 models on the build manifest, we were bound to do something silly, like accidentally get the scale wrong. Michael wasn’t too pleased with the ‘retro brick’ cell phone model, but Arrk Dison was extremely accommodating, adjusting their schedule to start that model from scratch and still hit the deadline. Eddie, Andy and Michael have been visiting this team every other day, including weekends, and working with them to build these beautiful models with functional hinge mechanisms and keypads.

Fascinating stuff. Efficiency with a chinese bent.