Yes, that's right. With help from sales people feeding me bottles, adding the color to each, and packing them back in cases, each with my card as their 'necklace', all those bottles were done in two different huge distributor facilities in the Dallas area. First batch was on Tuesday, 11/8, and the other yesterday, 11/10. Meghan, above, and Kelsey, below, shared the color duty as well as getting the bottles back in to their cases for later delivery to the stores.
The bottles were ordered by the MARKET STREET stores to have generic bottles in their wine departments for those individual shoppers who might not be in the store during one of my numerous events scheduled in the 7 local stores. Of course the bottles were not personalized, but did have either Cheers!, Celebrate, or Bottoms Up! in my script as shown in the example below, with the engraving filled with gold metallic paint.
On the table above, in this photo, there are about 70 bottles. The table was loaded several more times with this many bottles to complete their orders.
The bottle above is an example of the finished item. No personalization, but a word to make the bottle a more festive gift for the holidays. The letters have no contrasting thicks and thins because the pressure of the drill against the delicate carbonated wine-filled bottle. The drill merely 'skims' the glass with a feather-light touch, avoiding the seams, and just dark enough to pick up the color rubbed in later. As I've said countless times, I do NOT recommend you engrave pressurized bottles until you have several years experience and great control over the drill.
Several varieties of Champagne from one supplier made up the bottles on this Thursday, 11/10 session.
On Tuesday I was in the warehouse area at the other distributor location. I had only one sales person, Sam, not shown, handling the heavy lifting AND adding the color to the bottles that day. At this session, only Cheers! and Celebrate! were engraved and filled with gold.
This bottle was one from the warehouse session. Several different Champagnes were also provided from a major supplier for this batch of MARKET STREET stores.
This skid holds the entire order of bottles done in the warehouse. All bottles were headed for MARKET STREET stores and were on the shelves within 24 hours.
BY THE NUMBERS
Warehouse session......
• 420 total bottles
• Exactly 6 hours for the entire job
• Time to engrave and sign each bottle was approx 25 seconds
• Average per bottle approx 51 seconds included color and adding card to each
• Also part of the time, not including the engraving time, was packing and unpacking
Conference room session......
• 470 total bottles
• Exactly 5 hours, 45 minutes for entire job
• Time to engrave and sign each bottle was approx 25 seconds
• Average per bottle approx 44 seconds included color and adding card to each
• Also part of the time, not including the engraving time, was packing and unpacking
Big picture....
• 11 hours, 45 minutes total production time to process 890 bottles
• Average per bottle approx 47.5 seconds included color and adding card to each
• Average number of characters per bottle 15
• Approx number of characters in 890 bottles: 13, 330
• ONE #6 round carbide bur for all 890 bottles. A record! Skimming wears little!
• Average fee per bottle: $3.37