I wish I had found this tumblr long ago when my experiences might have seemed more relevant. It has been awhile without any posts but my need to contribute my few cents is strong enough for me to submit a couple things here. I guess I feel so strongly because I have never, in my life, worked with someone who has been able to get so much help and yet still always manage to make some of the worst possible decisions and also be so quick to screw over the people who have helped him the most.
First of all, I should explain a bit about who exactly I am and what my role in the ooples history is. My involvement with Ooples began long before they had the actual store or any actual employees. I was, so far as I know, their first actual paid employee. My job at ooples was to help design and make the hats as well as screenprint shirts with Crystal. I also helped in inventory organization as well as actually helping to build their first printing press. I even went with Franklin to look at locations when the ooples store was still just a dream he had (some space was definitely needed since we were all working out of Crystal’s one bedroom apartment).
I met Franklin when I joined ACES. At the time the group seemed to be going through quite a big spell of drama and a lot of people seemed to talk badly about or down to Franklin. I felt very sorry for him and didn’t understand why so many people seemed to be so hard on him. My boyfriend and I started talking more and more with him and became pretty good friends with him. Franklin later approached me with this business that he and Crystal were forming. Franklin knew I quite liked making things and had been looking for a job for awhile with little to no luck finding one. We all thought it would be a great idea to work together.
At this point there was still a lot of learning we all had to do with the actual process of, well, pretty much everything. This is when I first started noticing a different side to Franklin. Franklin always seemed too “busy” to actually learn the process of how to do any of the things he kept wanting done. I talked with him over and over about his unreasonable time lines and tried to explain to him the process of things so that he would understand better the time it was taking to make the things we were selling. Most of these conversations ended with him saying he was programming some inventory system and then he would run off to Crystal’s room and shut the door. The infuriating thing about it though is that I could hear him in there, watching 24 and Doctor Who (I think all Whovians can identify the tardis sound pretty easily). This was also the reaction if I mentioned we had a deadline coming for shirts and we weren’t anywhere near done. At the time we were using a rather unstable press for the shirt printing and we needed 2 people to work the press. Instead of getting off his ass and working with me to get shirts done he would hide in the bedroom and have me work on hats until Crystal would get home from work (this is when she still had her lab tech job). When Crystal did get home she was immediately met by Franklin barking orders at her and demanding she start work on things at that very moment.
As time went Franklin began go seek out and get larger orders. He managed to obtain a very large little league’s T-shirt order from a work contact (at the time Franklin was also working at a Pizza place). From the beginning this order seemed doomed. Nothing, and I do mean nothing, with it went right. We found ourselves in the last 48 hours trying madly to finish this order. For over a week I had pleaded with Franklin to call the client and tell him the situation, which would leave the client time for some sort of backup for their fist game and hopefully give us the time we needed to handle this size of an order. He would not do this. What happened next is honestly the most half brained, inconsiderate, and dangerous idea for a solution I have come across. Franklin went and picked up some homeless strangers, brought them to Crystal’s apartment, and had them work on T-shirts. I kid you not, he brought numerous men he had never met before into Crystal’s house and had them work there with her ALL NIGHT. Franklin, did not stay up all night might I add. I didn’t realize what was going on that night and was quite surprised to come back the next day and find that this was his great solution. I could not believe that he would put Crystal’s safety at such risk (and no, I do not know the exact arrangement he made with the homeless men, if they were paid, what they were paid). I was honestly pretty floored.
You might be asking yourself, if you weren’t there how did you know Franklin didn’t stay up with them. Upon returning to Crystals that morning I looked around at the T-shirts. They were a total mess. Numbers were placed wrong, ink was all over things, alignment was way off. It looked a total mess. I asked Franklin if he had even seen the shirts yet because there was no way we could hand those over to the client. Franklin came out to look at them and was just as shocked. He had no idea that they had turned out this way, meaning he didn’t stick around to watch any of the strangers he brought in to actually see what they had been doing. As for the order itself, we also found out later that we had been using the wrong ink for the jerseys and that upon being laundered the ink would come off. Franklin, when we learned this, was actually debating if he should or shouldn’t tell the client this. I actually do not know if he did tell the client. I will however point out that it is shortly after this that his job with the client’s pizza place ended. Take from that what you will.
Another sore point for me about my time with Ooples is that Franklin would often, when asking for a design to be made, use existing designs as “inspiration”. What usually would happen is he would want something and advise you to make it look like this other thing that someone else had already made. He seemed to have no qualms about ripping off people. At first it was very subtle. It was more like a suggestion to follow along a similar aesthetic. As time passed it became far clearer what his intentions had been all along. At the time he had started putting feelers out for other people to design shirts for ooples. He wanted to work with artists and pay them per design or offer to pay a percentage per shirt sold. An artist friend of mine was interested and contacted Franklin about designs. She said working with him was like bashing your head against a brick wall. Several times he would ask for revisions telling her to copy or mimic other work. She had to explain over and over why it is that she couldn’t, and quite frankly wouldn’t, do that. Later, right before I quit and one of the last straw events that made me quit, I had talked, at length, with Franklin about making and selling a certain item at his store. I later found images on their facebook of items he had commissioned from an independent seller that were the exact item I had talked with him about. I know for a fact this has happened since then. I once talked with the owner of Nine Tails about this because a similar situation happened where Franklin started commissioning items that he had seen being sold over in Nine Tails ( I believe the item was an 8bit bow ).
Payment, when I was living in TX didn’t seem too much of an issue. He usually paid me late but I was always paid. When my boyfriend was sent overseas for deployment (he was in the army) I decided to move back with my parents (in Ohio) for the duration of his deployment. Franklin had me make some hats while I was in Ohio and send them to him. I believe it was for their first convention. This began the most frustrating time i’ve had with an employer about payment. I’ve written alot here so I’ll try and broadstroke this a bit. I waited over five months to be paid for the work I did and I had to threaten prosecution to get it (rather my grandfather threatened it and Franklin heard him). Franklin had new excuses every time we talked, most of them blaming “that idiot Crystal” for forgetting to send my money.
I kept pretty quiet about my personal experiences with Franklin for a very long time. I parted ways with the company and ended my friendship with Franklin. As much as I do not like him I didn’t want to say anything that would hurt the business, for Crystal’s sake. I know she put a lot into the business not only money but her time and creative energies. Crystal is a talented individual and I have a lot of respect for her as she is the person I often worked with. She deserves to be treated respectfully and i’ve always hoped, that if nothing else Franklin would at least realize his mistakes with her and make up for them. After reading through other accounts here I see not much has changed and that is very sad. I do think maybe I had the best intentions but the wrong solution when it came to staying quiet about my time with Ooples. Maybe if I had said something sooner more people would have been more aware of Franklin and how he operates.
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