We was chocolate before chocolate was cool.
It was a great idea, before its time. Oh, and I didn’t exactly know what I was doing.
The late 1990s and early 2000s saw me straying into some areas that were a result of my arrogance and ignorance. I haven’t written yet about my short, disastrous foray into comic book publishing, but it led into a fun, but equally calamitous venture. Chocolate bars.
Long story, short, in 1997 I put together a few people to invest to save storied, but troubled underground comix publisher Kitchen Sink Press, founded in Princeton, Wisconsin, but relocated in Northampton, Massachusetts. In addition to comics, the company put out all sorts of artist tangential products like trading cards, cloisonne pins, and my favorite and their best selling product, R. Crumb Devil Girl Choco(late) Bars. When it was clear that KSP was going to continue being a black hole of financial losses it shut down. Clearly, I had no idea how to usefully help the company, and my living in Los Angeles with the company 2,920 miles away didn’t help one bit.
I’d lost a lot of money, including my wife’s savings and my kid’s college fund, and I really wanted to earn it back for my family’s sake. Fast forward, I did, but certainly not in the KSP spin off I conceived.
For reasons best sorted out with a therapist, I love everyday objects that have cool images printed on them. Skateboards, T-shirts, posters, you get the idea. So the fact that chocolate bars are obsessions of a lot of people, no matter their age, gender, location, and the R.Crumb and Fabulous Freak Brothers bars being a hit that I felt KSP had ignored in their plight, I got the bright idea of partnering with a Massachusetts based KSP consultant to launch a company named True Confections, solely in the business of boxes of chocolate bars with cool images printed on them. Can’t go wrong, right?
As I write this post in 2024, it’s pretty common to find “cool” candy bars in gourmet markets around the country. But, that wasn’t the case in the 00′s. We came up with some pretty neat designs (a few of them above), and our sales team did pretty well too. We sold pretty successfully everywhere from Toys’R’Us to Home Depot to my local Santa Monica pharmacy (they could keep Devil Girl’s in stock!). But, we didn’t know how to source the bars with good chocolate at a good price, and of course, we had no idea how to ship the candy properly when the weather turned hot. Long story short, True Confections was eating money faster than KSP was, and honestly, I got sick of eating chocolate myself.
It was fun while it lasted, but like I said up above, we were ahead of our time.
And, as I’ve learned, over and over, a great idea is all well and good, but if you can’t execute... well, that’s that.
