In a loft next to Roberta’s Pizza in Brooklyn reside a fleet of Handwriting robots, sitting idle until the next time they are called into action. 

I came to meet these robots (and my Wami co-founders) while working at Bond. I joined Bond right after they were acquired by Newell Brands (the owners of Rubbermaid, Sharpie, Yankee Candle, among other brands) for a rumored $20 million in 2016, and over a few years, we built up a handwritten note business working under the Newell umbrella. 

Alas, in late 2018, Newell decided they were going to close Bond and divest from their assets. This decision by Newell set the stage for us to purchase and relaunch these robots with Wami. 

The end days of Bond

I was one of the last people remaining at Bond, and part of my job at the very end was helping Newell Brands find a buyer for the assets. The majority of the physical assets at that point were inside of the Josten’s (yes, Josten’s, the yearbook company) plant in Clarksville, TN. Josten’s was another Newell Brand that was also being sold off during this time period. 

We put together an inventory of the physical assets and shopped it around to prospective buyers with a 7-day timeline for submitting bids and a requirement for the purchaser to acquire and remove the assets from the Clarksville plant within 7 days of acceptance of the bid. 

This asset removal provision is what proved to be a hurdle for the majority of interested parties, so the bid window closed without any proposals accepted by the Newell Leadership. 

Faced with the prospect of all this incredible technology about to be sent to a landfill, I and a few others had a vision for what we could do with the robots, so we decided to take a chance, and we submitted a last-minute winning proposal. 

It was time for a road trip, and we headed down to Tennessee to pick up our robots. 

Picking up our robots

After the ink dried on our contract with Newell to purchase the assets, we flew down to Nashville, rented a 26-foot Penske truck, and got to work. 

We moved everything off the floor of the Josten’s plant into a nearby storage unit, and we loaded up the truck with robots, tables, mailing equipment, and anything else we could fit and drove back north to start our own robot production studio in Bushwick. 

While we were at the Josten’s plant, we were able to sell some of the physical assets we just acquired back to the Josten’s team, which helped us jumpstart our cash reserves in the early days of starting Wami. 

Side note, Hattie B’s in Nashville has incredible fried chicken and is worth the hype. We made sure to make multiple pit stops there. 

Making some ambitious mistakes

Once we had our business up and running with the Bushwick production studio, we decided to make our own agreement with Josten’s to sublease space and leverage their super skilled seasonal labor staff to run our operations back down in Tennesee. 

In retrospect, this was a mistake in that 1) we didn’t have enough latent demand for our notes to provide an efficient return on investment for the upfront ~$100k+ cost of standing up this remote facility and 2) we naively didn’t recognize how unequal our negotiating power was with the billion-dollar Josten’s company. 

This second point acutely burned us when Covid descended on the world. As the pandemic dragged on and demand for our handwritten notes disappeared, Josten’s notified us they were terminating our lease and gave us 30 days to once again vacate the premises. 

Beyond potentially expensive litigation against a much deeper-pocketed adversary, we had no choice but to close up shop in Tennessee. 

Brooklyn or bust 

Now that we had been forced to vacate the Josten’s plant twice, we decided it was time to restructure Wami in a way that gave it a much better chance at survival. We enhanced our Brooklyn production studio with more robots and got other jobs to reduce our cash flow. 

We invested in building automation to manage many facets of our business, and now Wami is set up as a usually profitable, mostly seasonal business, primarily helping luxury brands from fashion houses such as Kering, Richemont, and LVMH send out customer loyalty notes at scale. 

The robots are on standby, resting peacefully until the next handwritten note campaign they are called into action for.