We bought the first round of merchandise!

We got to order the first bunch of things!  That you bought!  That we don’t have yet!  We’re excited!

Yep, we finally spent some of that money you sent to us.  We bought the Pins, Patches, Buttons and Hats.  They should be arriving in a couple weeks.  We can’t wait to get them and hold them in our hands.  And mail them to you.

UPDATE:  The proof for the patch was…  well we’re going to have them give it another go.  It isn’t bad, in fact you probably wouldn’t notice the difference, but there were some liberties taken in converting our image into the final product.  The company has been great, they’re going to take another whack at it now that they know we’re picky.  Hah!

Ideamen Patch Proof ImageUPDATE:  The Buttons have arrived!  And they’re cooler than our placeholder images.  We had an opportunity to make them cooler (on a shiny backing and with a background image instead of white).  Awesome.  Thanks Daisy!

Ideamen Bottle Opener Button

Tickets are available for the Mojoes show with Foxy!

Hey, we just got the tickets for the show at Mojoes with Foxy Shazam.  They’re pretty.

Mojoes TicketsWe just added them as an item in the store.  No shipping charge on these, grab ’em and we’ll mail them to you soon!

Here’s the info:

Foxy Shazam, OD Jo and Ideamen!
Friday December 27th 2013

At Mojoes
22 W Cass St.
Joliet, IL 60432

All Ages
Doors: 07:00PM
Show: 08:00PM
$18 if ya buy ‘em now
$20 at the door if you wait

Crunching the numbers of the first three weeks

Hey folks!  Thought you might like to know how we did in those stressful first three weeks of the campaign.  We did better than we thought!  Here’s the rundown:

Packages
Qty – Item
04 – ALL of the New Stuff Pack
02 – Old School Pack
05 – Schemata and a Hat Pack
18 – Schemata and a Shirt Pack
01 – Schemata, a Shirt and a Zippo Pack
13 – Some of the New Stuff Pack

Individual Item Breakdown
Qty – Item
59 – Schemata CD
03 – Interesting Times CD
07 – Schemata Cover Shirt
10 – Socrates Hoodie
22 – Tesla Shirt
17 – Light Bulb Logo Shirt
01 – Brain Drone Shirt
05 – Pin
05 – Patch
06 – Ideamen Zippo
09 – Hat With Flight Patch
04 – Bottle Opener Button
05 – Brain Tank Shirt
07 – Masquerade Shirt
02 – Alien Head

The total dollars counted towards the campaign in those first three weeks added up to a grand total of $2973.09!  But wait, doesn’t that mean we reached another goal?  Yes!  But no.  We decided to change the format of the stretch goals to $500 increments, partly because the $250 increments were going by so quickly – but mostly because our stretch goals are broader and somewhat more difficult than just giving away free stuff.

The first stretch goal at $3000 is really an extension of the initial campaign – we couldn’t afford to buy women’s style shirts in our initial estimate, but we really wanted them.  They cost us over twice as much as the regular tees (can you say gouge?), and lucky for us we decided to set the stretch goals in $500 increments.

The $3000 goal will allow us to get them, and if you want one, you’ll be able to buy one.  If you already bought a shirt or shirts (excluding the Color Schemata Album Cover Shirt) and would prefer them in the womens style, you can contact us and we’ll switch it for you at no additional cost.

There are more stretch goals, but this time around we’ll be keeping them to ourselves.  We’ll tell you the next one, just ‘cos that’s how it’s done.  Reaching $3500 will set Dave to work on an annotated lyrics page.  No, it’s not going to cost $500, but it will take some work and Dave hopes to make it a little fancy.  We might have to spend some money on plugins for the site.

Thanks again everyone for making this a successful campaign, hope to see you soon on the road!

Ideamen 2014 Promo Picture

We made it home from Detroit on THIS

Fried Ignition CableSometimes we get lucky.  Sometimes we get real lucky.  We drove to Detroit and back yesterday, and it seemed like we were burning gas way too quickly.  In the morning the van wouldn’t start.  A quick inspection revealed that the ignition cable had fried to a crisp.  This might explain why we recently had to replace the ignition coil.  Still searching for an explanation of how we made it home.  Sometimes we get lucky.

We reached the Campaign Goal!

We dit it!  You did it!  We reached the campaign goal just shy of three weeks in – the three weeks that made us really really nervous when we started this thing.  What if we didn’t make it?  Now we don’t have to think about that because you pulled us through it, right on time!

The campaign is not over, noooo – it goes on and on until February 4th 2014, the official release date of Schemata.  Everyone who orders until then will get all the goodies that have piled up until now.  Hey…  this goal gets everyone buttons that are also bottle openers!  Yeah, we know, kind of an anti-climax, but you know you want one.

You still have one more day to order anything and get your special early bird gifts!  You have till midnight on November 21st.

What’s next?  We have a long time to go before this is over, and we’ve given some thought as to where we should go from here.   We’ll be updating you shortly.  Let there be stretch goals!

We reached the ninth goal!

Ni!  I mean Nine!  So I just got back from a local production of Spamalot with my sis and pops, still whistling “Always Look On The Bright Side Of Life” as I got back to my computer, and lo and behold, a whole slew of new orders had piled up during the course of the day.  We’re at $2250, a mere $250 away from our campaign goal!  I’ll bite your legs off!  Um…  sorry about that.

What this means for you, is a download of a haunting minimalist remix of “Incident”.  I just gave it a listen to make sure the links work and I gots’ me a lump in my throat.  Well done Chris.  It’s loaded up in the Downloads page.  What this means to us is we’re gonna have to slap a new video together to celebrate reaching the goal!  And…  what comes after that?

Our hearts go out to the folks who lost their homes and lives from the storm that ripped through here today.  We got hit by a sliver that broke off the east side of the storm system, it was bad, but nothing like what was happening at the center.  Here are a couple ways to help:

American Red Cross
Salvation Army

We reached the eigth goal!

Hello and thanks again from Ideamen!  Things have of course slowed down a bit since the launch, but your orders keep coming in, and we’ve reached the $2000 milestone.  This is awesome for us because we’re still slightly ahead of schedule, and we can safely say that the pre-order campaign was a success even though it’s only started.

At the $2000 goal, every order received during the campaign will get an Ideamen promo poster, signed by the band.  Will you hang it in your bathroom or your bedroom?

We just posted a second video about the campaign on youtube.  It is slightly behind schedule, but we had a lot of things to do last week.  Check it out!

We reached the seventh goal!

Ideamen played a show in St. Joseph Michigan last night, and since we cheated last time, we’ll do it again.  You won’t mind.  We applied the merch sales to our campaign, and once again it pushed us past another goal!  At $1750 we get to put up another remix – this time, it’s “The Rest” mangled into a jarring and unexpected industrial jungle surf beat mixup.  Get it on the Downloads page.

11 days left to get to $2500!  Thank you all again for your support!

We had a change made to our release schedule, Schemata’s official release date is now Feb 4 2014.  We’re currently sticking to our schedule as far as the campaign goes, but we now have some decisions to make about when we will purchase/ship the merchandise.  Originally we had scheduled to ship by Dec 15th and get it all to you before Christmas.  We will not have Schemata in our hands by then – but we intend to have most or all of the other merchandise.  We are considering shipping all the other merch out by Christmas and shipping Schemata separately when it arrives.  We’ll keep you posted and we’ll likely put a poll or something like it up on the facebook for you to chime in and assist us with our decision.