It’s hard for me to believe that 16 years have passed since we launched The Fitz Like A Glove™ Ironing Board Cover in February 1994.
The journey has been so interesting – and challenging – and all consuming – that it seems like only yesterday that Victor and I were huffing and puffing our way through six weeks of prototype design before we pushed Rita’s gift down the chute of Kandos Post Office.
I have very vivid memories of arriving in Ilford in 1992.
And I admit to, at times, often being perplexed.
About things such as:-
When it came to the weather reports, where exactly were we?
As the Village Of Ilford is too small to ever be mentioned, we had to position ourselves according to regional areas.
Were we in The Central Tablelands? Or The Central West? Or The Southern Slopes? Or The Central Slopes?
The three local TV stations at the time were:-
WIN: – Channel 9
Prime:- Channel 7
Capitol:- Channel 10.
Although each station concentrated on one regional area, they often overlapped with weather predictions.
Once we knew for sure where we were:- The Central Tablelands, I could focus on far more interesting things, such as local TV commercials.
And I was equally perplexed by their lack of the glitz and razzmatazz of national TV and shiny Sydney, which we just happily escaped.
They were cosy. Homsey. Even folksey in their ambience. A hayseed protruding from the mouth isn’t that far of a stretch.
Because.
These commercials were about the numerous long standing, family owned businesses that thrived in our locality.
Then.
I was hearing messages like:
..> We’ve been advising people since 1949.
..> Serving the community for 25 years.
..> Our family business goes back 5 generations and my family knows your family.
Get the picture?
Which was a mind boggling concept to me.
We arrived poor as church mice, devastated by Prime Minister Paul Keating’s 1992 ‘recession we had to have’, with not an inkling about how we would support ourselves.
And when we launched the Fitz Like A Glove™ Ironing Board Cover in 1994, it was always a struggle to get established without the internet, email, call waiting, a second phone line or even a sealed road outside our front gate to Bathurst.
The future was no further away than the immediate here and now.
Did I also mention that retailers were hugely under whelmed and pointedly uninterested in us?
A state of mind that was reciprocated by me.
I’m now 16 years into my journey along this particular Yellow Brick Road.
Today, I have 200,000+ men and women all over the world who iron on a cover that Fitz Like A Glove™.
Throw in the fashion designers, swish hotels, fashion design schools, couture bridal gown makers, the humble laundries and professional ironers who add to that mix, and we have a lot of word of mouth going for us.
But it seems the very best word of mouth is what a whole generation of kids are learning from the ironing boards of their mums and dads.
Yes, it’s hard for me to believe that a whole generation of children have grown up ironing on a Fitz Like A Glove™ Ironing Board Cover at home.
And when they leave to set up their own digs, they ask, even plead, for mum and dad to buy one for them.
We once had a surprise visit from a posse of young bikers on holiday from the Australian Navy, fronting up at our gate wanting to buy a cover each.
Because one of their mates grew up with this cover at home and had one on his board back at the barracks.
Who would have thought that because of perseverance, determination and unshakable belief that this is a wonderful product that will transform lives, I’m now living the commercials of the 1990′s, spruiking that “my family owned business knows your family”?!
This Guerrilla From The Bush knows that when a whole generation of children grow up ironing on a cover that always Fitz Like A Glove™, they’ll never settle for anything else.
Take care,
Carol
