Thursday, July 27th, 2006

Sponsored by Looney Labs

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This week we're bidding farewell (from a payroll perspective) to Alvaro Gonzalez, who's been helping us sell our games, on and off, for over 5 years, first as a free-lance sales associate, later as our part-time Corporate Sales Manager, but always most affectionately as our Sales Baron. Alvaro will be greatly missed!

We first met him when one of Alison's best friends from college, Suzyn Jackson, introduced us to the cool dude she'd decided to get married to. The 3 of us attended their wedding (with Alison being in the wedding party) in October 2001 in New York City, which is where they were living at the time. Given Alvaro's background in sales, we immediately started getting his help on an occasional basis, most notably at the Toy Fairs of 2002 and 2003, when he would come downtown to the Javit's Center for a few days to help us staff our booth.

By the summer of 2005, Alvaro and Suzyn had moved to the DC area (and had a child) and Alvaro finally became a regular member of our team. Since then he's been doing a lot to help us grow and mold our sales department. He's been helping the team get better organized and focused, and has been training Alison, Luisa, and Carol in the fine arts of good sales work. Of course, Alvaro was also a big help at Toy Fair and GTS this past year, when he became a Treehouse-teaching machine!

But Alvaro has found another cool dream to go chase... remember his lovely and talented wife Suzyn, from the beginning of this story? During all of our adventures she's been developing her writing career, and after getting a couple of articles (about knitting) published in books (about knitting), she's been commissioned to write an entire book of her own (about, you guessed it, knitting.) She's got this angle, see, about people who get together to work on group projects, so her book is going to be all about these knitting circles. So she's researching all these groups, and here's how it all ties together: they're also hiring Alvaro to take all the pictures! They're looking for many hundreds of photos to illustrate Suzyn's book (working title: Knit It Together) so Alvaro is going to be traveling all around, taking pictures of people knitting.