April « 2010 « SwingStomp

MHP helps Trinity Amplification and its Blue Angel take flight

Posted by Mark A. Heinz at 10:23 PM Central

Just about exactly two years ago, I met Charley Geiler, fellow musician and lead engineer and owner of Trinity Amplification, Inc. (Trinity), at St. Louis Bread Company for a meeting about marketing, branding, and promotion for his new company and its flagship product.

Charley had an awesome, new product, a guitar effects pedal called the Blue Angel, that he was very excited about. He’d been selling crudely-painted and printed (yet fully functional), single units of the product to friends—basically out of the trunk of his car—and had no marketing plan in place other than the word-of-mouth buzz that the Blue Angel had already started to create for itself (note: I’m no guitar gear-head myself, but I’m told this pedal is the cat’s meow of analog chorus pedals; in fact, Captain Kirk of the Roots and Late Night With Jimmy Fallon fame reportedly owns one and loves it).

Long story short: Mark Heinz Productions (MHP) has been working closely with Charley and his business associate Ian Baird at Trinity Amplification, Dan O’Saben and crew at Marketing28, screen printers Ryan and Amanda Malaschak at Adrenaline Prints, and painter Rob Williams to see the Trinity company and the Blue Angel product through from their rough, rushed beginnings to a well-planned and organized business and a beautiful, solid-as-a-tank product, respectively.

It’s taken quite a while for Charley, who also works full time elsewhere and was recently married and very busy with planning the wedding and the new life he would share with his bride-to-be, and company to get their proper footing and get things just the way they wanted them before officially launching phase two of Trinity and the Blue Angel, but the time has finally arrived. The pedal and the company have brand new looks, and a solid framework and plan is now in place and underway for the company and the sale of its products.

Check out the Blue Angel analog chorus pedal first as it looked on that day that I met Charley at St. Louis Bread Company:

Blue Angel (before)

And now as the Blue Angel looks today as a finished—and currently-shipping—product:

Blue Angel (after)

Bee-yoo-tee-ful.

Marketing28 and MHP put together a clean, little website for the company that I think turned out very nicely and is extremely functional. Check it out at trinityamplification.com, and you guitarist and bassist types may want to get one of the Blue Angel pedals to try for yourselves.

After you play through it, let me know what all the fuss is about. For I am but a drummer; I do not understand your chorus-y, electric, modern ways. *buh-dum pooooshhh*

Myself and my associates hope for all the best for Charley, Ian, and Trinity. Cheers, fellas!

Filed Under: Production Work

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Got a mysterious check in the mail? You may not want to cash it.

Posted by Mark A. Heinz at 4:10 PM Central

Look, as much as I liked the idea of getting a check in the mail, out of the blue and completely unexpected, for $3,875.00, I was just a tad bit skeptical. Because—you know—I don’t usually get checks mailed to me for no reason.

I got the below package in the mail a couple of days ago, and after some quick Google-ing, I discovered that (SURPRISE!) it was a scam.

The actual secret-shopper mail scam package that I received in the mail (click to enlarge)

An enclosed letter claimed that I’d “indicated to be interested in an additional income on part time basis [sic]” at some point (no, I didn’t), and that they were now following up and sending me everything I needed (including payment and spending money) to become one of their official “secret shoppers.” And my first assignment? Cash the check they’d sent me, and then go to a Western Union location to rate the quality of service I receive there. Typical secret-shopper stuff, I suppose.

I should mention that I didn’t reach out to the sender, and that I know what my first assignment would have been only as a result of my Google search and upon subsequently inspecting the included “customer evaluation/survey form” that I was to fill out as a secret shopper. If you look at the aforementioned survey form, you’ll notice a mention of a Western Union ‘Moneygram,’ which corroborated all of the related scam stories I’d found during my search.

The scam is simple: Cash their very authentic-looking check at your bank, and then wire a bunch—if not all—of that money via Western Union to the scammer under the guise of a ‘secret shopper’ experience. Basically, the scammer has you believe that you’re just rating the quality of service that you received from the Western Union clerk with whom you’d dealt. The bad news for you is that the check is fake, and by the time it bounces, you’re held responsible and are required to pay your bank for the amount of the bounced check.

Since you’re supposed to cash the check and do the deed within 24 hours—and since the scammer can collect the money from any Western Union branch in the state that you wire it to—chances are very, very slim that they’d ever be caught.

So, if you get something like this sent to you unsolicited, I hate to tell you, but it’s probably too good to be true. Check it out first lest ye end up owing thine bank a bushel basket of coin.

Filed Under: Advice

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29 Apr 2010 (Thu)