Chapter 28 – School Days and Business expansion
In august of 2006, Sammy entered 5th grade. New school and hopefully making new friends; we hoped.
I was settling into my new routine of working. I would work a day or two at Universal on projects, then one night go to Sanford to my sign shop and crank out the work for my clients and then work 2 days at my shop. With having a laptop, you really can work from almost anywhere you happen to be.
Jake would work at his Disney job (lucky bastard) 3 or 4 days a week, come in sometimes in the morning or evening and help with the sign shop and on the weekends to get some larger projects done. Soon we hired another person that I had worked with temporarily at Universal and they manned the shop when neither of us could be there.
Dad’s woodworking business was taking off pretty good too. He did woodworking for vanilla clients under one name, and continued to build furniture under the Forever a Toddler brand.
The space next to the sign shop became available and he jumped on it and eventually would buy the whole building in partnership with me. He would do the design for the furniture and I would do the graphics.
Our employee Juan once was driving by late at night and saw the lights on and was worried that he had left the lights on, and he walked in on us doing the very babyish graphics for several cribs, play pens and high chairs.
“Oh hello Jay, Jim. Sorry to have walked in on something. I thought I had left the lights on.” Juan said hoping he was not going to get into trouble
“No, you closed up just fine. We just re-open some nights after dinner for our special projects.” Dad said. “I make furniture for a certain subset called Adult Babies. Basically people who like living as a toddler.”
“Well and there are people younger than adults who do this too. We even have clients who are handicapped who order these things too” I said. My dad looking at me and me looking back at him.
“Ok, so here’s the thing, when I first had my accident I was sent a bed that was a pretty much a crib, everybody who saw it thought it was one. I had a lot of things that I had to go through after the accident.
An internet search found others who were into the ABDL thing, even if they too had to wear diapers liked to regress to deal with their situation. Sure enough I found that regressing into a toddler did help.” I went on to say, bearing my inner life.
“Surely you not the only one?” Juan asked
“Oh no, there are thousands upon thousands around the world.” My dad said
“Yeah, I can pretty much guarantee that Sammy will be one the older he gets, since dad already built him a crib.” I said
“Ahh little Sammy. Hey…. Your cousin Jake……do he wear diaper” Juan said
“Yep both of them” my dad said
“I thought so, his girl she like mommy him all time” Juan said as we just busted out laughing.
“Mom, Jakes Mom and a whole host of ladies make all these items as well.” I said as I pulled up the Forever A Toddler website.
“Holy cow!” Juan said “You gots a business there”
After explaining what it is that my dad does and the private projects we work on, and about the ABDL side of life… He showed his skills at hand painting accents and designs on furniture.
“You know Juan, it is great that you walked in tonight… we were going to have to tell you soon, as that side of our enterprises were getting bigger than the vanilla front. Plus damn you’re good at those details” I said
So Juan would help at the sign shop and when dad’s projects got to the point that they needed the graphics and painting he would go next door to help dad out.
He once said “I cannot believe that people pay that for this furniture, but if they buy it we make it.”
We figured in one year that we made close to 100 cribs, and about that many high chairs and many other items. This was due to not needing to hide the work for just at night.
It was funny, Forever a Toddler had more data security than any other small business I knew; mainly because the clients were so secretive.
I know for a fact we shipped to celebrities and a few politicians. I am not sure if it was for them or their kids. I know that we started to get into the special needs market because we started getting requests for feeding tube access flaps, and sleepers with zippers in the back.
The profits of Forever a Toddler LLC allowed us to expand operations. We were able to hire more people. We established a network of “installers” who could receive the pallets containing items such as cribs, highchairs, changing tables, etc.
Dad would build the crib or whatever, do all the lettering and painting to them. Then the item was disassembled, had a protective covering, and was loaded onto a pallet or crate and once a week a freight truck picked up what was produced.
The furniture would then be delivered directly to the customer, or to an installer who would deliver it and set up the item.
This increased our sales of furniture because we found many of our customers weren’t the most handy with tools to re-assemble a crib. Highchairs aren’t that hard as they can ship with the top and bottom separated and the top flipped to stack on the bottom. We even had customers who would drive to Florida to pickup their furniture from around the country.