The purchase of a design is a fascinating process. An interested customer sits down on one side of the table while the designer (and his hard-working assistant) stands opposite. The designs, printed on 69cm paper squares in our case, are removed one at a time from the top of a stack, revealing a new explosion of shape and color every two seconds or so.

As the customer sees designs they* would like to turn into a bedspread, wallpaper, purse or (for all I know) designer condom, these are set aside into a separate stack that can sometimes end up numbering thirty or forty prints. This smaller stack is then recursively reduced, in a process reminiscent of distillation.

The next step, psychologically, is by far the most fascinating. The customer asks what the prints cost. I, knowing full well what the prints cost, ask Mineeda-san in Japanese what the prints cost. He, knowing full well what the prints cost, furrows his brow, looks the customers over, considers in his invoice book, counts the number of designs, and quotes a price that no one has ever, ever paid for a design. The customer, deeply shocked, looks the prints over a second time, shaking their heads in utter disbelief, and counters by quoting the price of the hamburger they had for lunch (this isn't totally unreasonable, actually - a hamburger at a trade fair costs so much you'd expect it to come with fries, a milkshake and a Porsche). My boss laughs out loud, and says "no, no, no." This is one of his three English phrases, the others being "no English" and "receipt please." What can I say; the man follows the advice of his accountant religiously.

Eventually, a price is reached which neither side is particularly happy about. Money - enough to buy a small car if only a few designs are involved, enough to buy a small house (I am not exaggerating) in the case of a particularly large purchase - changes hands in the one direction, intellectual property in the other. My boss sits down next to me as the customer walks away, artwork rolled under their arm, and wonders out loud how he can survive accepting such prices. Then the next customer comes along, and the cycle begins anew.


*I hate "he/she", "he or she", "s/he", and every other alternative I know assuming a gender. Also, every sentence should not be written in the passive voice, as this is found to be annoying by me. There are those who propose introducing a new pronoun for indeterminate gender, but we have already had a pretty good one in vernacular English for a really really long time, so those people should get down off their "third person plural" grammatical high horses, bite me, and then join me in embracing this eminently practical device.