sp150302 A Business
Plan for Rembrandt and Wine Starting with a kernel
The next challenge for the ambitious founder of the Seattle
Printmakers Center is to write nineteen business plan kernels for the nineteen
businesses that comprise the entire center concept, and he begins by using the
Rembrandt and Wine franchise concept. ©2015 Bill
Ritchie
It began with a screwdriver
How does a home-made screwdriver work to develop a community? This is what
is meant by a “kernel” of a business concept implying that a very small item
can be one of the keys to writing the full plan of a new business.
My challenge is to create a cooperative, interactive group, somewhat like a
club, to build out the plans for the Seattle Printmakers Center. Seattle is a
perfect place for this center, because it begins with the root of all the new
technologies—the invention of the template for printing—and spins out into the
unknown future, then the adventure curves back to traditional hand-printing. We discovered
this principle when my students and I were in college in the 1970s and this
idea is the core of the Seattle Printmakers Center philosophy.
The screwdriver pictured happens to be one of the items which is sent to buyers of
the WeeWoodie Rembrandt Press. It is made of a Number 1 Philips driver bit, a wooden
spool, and a stub of quarter-inch wood dowel. This home-made screwdriver is a
humble, simple tool which could—if millions of them were needed—be massed-produced
in an offshore company. In fact, dozens of these screwdrivers are already
available online for a dollar or two each if bought in units of 100 or more.
However, this screwdriver is part of a kit to make a WeeWoodie Rembrandt
Press I arrived at after a number of tries, and I was making one
this morning when it occurred to me that, not only is it a little part of a
bigger thing (the kit) but it is also part of a bigger plan, which is the Rembrandt and
Wine business proposal.
In software engineering, I learned the word “kernel” used in the context of
software operations. As I was raised on a farm, the origin of the word meant
corn or wheat—any kind of seed that, when planted and cultivated, would yield
more than the sum of its parts. The miracles of Nature are well-known to
farmers.
Also in software design, the "kernel" can work “miracles” if it is treated
intelligently and elegantly by software engineers it and resembles the creative and productive aspects
of creative artists. A screwdriver, for example (and the part it plays in a larger
scheme) as I am to realize my vision of the Seattle Printmakers Center is going to take the realization of my commitment to the tenets of the
design.
The Seattle Printmakers Center holds a kernel of creating jobs for
young people in ways related to printmaking as a complex art form. the art form is
complex because printmaking is a medium that has more aspects to it than meet
the eye. Printmaking is as much a performance art as its products (prints) are visual arts for the eye. This fact is at the base of all nineteen elements of
the Seattle Printmakers Center. The screwdriver is part of the Rembrandt and
Wine concept, as well as the printmaking toys and games (part of Young
Printmakers).
A Rembrandt and Wine franchise uses at least ten Wood Rembrandt Presses, which will be a patented
design one step larger than the WeeWoodie Rembrandt Press. When a franchise is
signed on, the presses arrive at the franchisee as disassembled, and each press comes with a
screwdriver of the type I designed: made up in Seattle out of a bit, a spool, and a piece of dowel by members of the Seattle Printmakers Community.
(To be continued)
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