Hi. Seeing as how this is my first post to the Hello Rewind blog, an introduction is in order. My name is J.Todd Smith, and today has been a pretty momentous day. After months of planning. After consultations with anti-sex trafficking experts, and lawyers, and a seamstress. After making sure a training instructor was in place. And after working the numbers so that the women at the center of Hello Rewind would be at the top of the profit pyramid… We saw our laptop sleeve business come into existence in the wee hours of Monday morning. The response has been overwhelming and exhilarating all at once. And it’s been diverse. The Love First the love: A mere 12 hours after launch, Tweets, blog posts, and all kinds of internet love came flooding our way by the hundreds (still rising at the time of this post). Then came Gizmodo with an amazing post titled, “Hello Rewind Transforms Your Old T-Shirts Into Laptop Sleeves”. Incredible. This was going to work. This was going to help women find employment other than the vile line of work they’d been, at least upon first coming to America, forced into. All the late nights, and sobering realities to which we’d subjected ourselves was going to have meaning. The Hammer Then the hammer: okay, “hammer” is far too strong a term. More acutely, we received a couple tough questions in the comment section of the aforementioned Gizmodo post. It underscores something we knew all along: this effort is not all roses and ponies. Without rehashing, the comments wondered aloud whether we are sincere (we all have been involved with fighting sex trafficking even before founding Hello Rewind and the Longitude), whether the women are the main focus of this operation (they are), and if we’d thought this out well (we have, though things will always evolve and improve). The Love Hammer Overall, we couldn’t have asked for a better launch. The love has been sincere and intense. And even the few hammers have been constructive. It’s nearly midnight and, thanks to all the motivating comments and tough questions, we’re energized to make this thing more effective, more transparent, and more impactful. We’ll start by making our FAQ section more clear, and posting a blog entry to answer all of the great questions we’ve received so far – offering bigger sleeves will run a close second. Sleep seems so far away.
