In 1997, Rick Schaffer walked into my office at Internet Performance in Anaheim, CA. He had been to Germany and visited Fashy, the world's premier manufacturer of thermoplastic hot water bottles. Rick asked me if I could build an ecommerce Website to sell these products. He had negotiated an exclusive US distributorship. Next thing I know sales are brisk and Rick needs help with fulfillment. The timing was perfect. I had just sold my company and thought I could help. So I wrote code in the morning and fulfilled FashionHot orders in the afternoon.

By 2006, Rick decided to retire and I took over the company. We had primarily been selling to the retail market on our Website. I thought we might do better acting as the distributor we, actually, were and sell wholesale only to resellers. So that's what we did. I started shipping from Fashy, in Germany, via ship instead of air, and that saved enough to make wholesale sales possible. We also decided to make our own covers because Fashy cut the cover very close to the neck, making them more difficult to get on and off. I designed the pattern, after nine tries to get it right! We buy fabric from importers, mostly in Los Angeles. We use a local artisan cut-and-sew company here in Phoenix to manufacture the covers to our specifications. Maria is just awesome!

Our two most productive resellers were both on Amazon, (we only allowed two on Amazon). We shipped pallets to them. We also had many small resellers that often told us heartwarming stories about their customer's experiences. It was an absolute blast for many years.

Now, Sherry and I are slowing down considerably. We are no longer Fashy's distributor. Nor is anyone else. So, the roughly 1,500 hot water bottles we still have in stock are the last of it. We think Etsy is the perfect place to offer these extraordinary products.