I have personally been off work last week but it is, of course, business as usual at TD.  Design School went on its travels again, this time to Washington.  We are testing our travelling Design School to see what works and how to finance it.  The Washington trip was by all accounts, a great success.  All the feedback I've got shows that Steve and Chintu did a great job and it looks like we will be rolling out as planned next year. (Chintu says he was so busy during the school, he didn't have time to take any pictures.... but this is proof he was there at least!

The week before Chintu and Grace took Design School to Rome.  Here you can see our pioneer Italian Opticians with Chintu and their customer service agent, Grace.

Finally, even though I'm not at work, I can't resist doing a little design when the family is asleep.  Here you can see a work in progress for a new ladies titanium frame.  It is only half finished in this picture, but I didn't want to show any as yet as I am putting a lot of work in to this ladies expansion.

Last week was a busy week for Design School and almost every day was full.  It is always a pleasure to be a part of Design School and help our Opticians learning how to use Supertool.  What is even better is that now Opticians are designing their own frames while they are here.  This is because we have added a module for DESIGNER to the design school. 

Opticians are able to design their frames and the next day (if it is a double design school) they get to see their technical drawings and take them away. Being in the studio really seems to help as well, since they have access to the entire collection and library of components.

Here you can see a little experiment.  We are adding SIDE VIEWS to the bespoke portfolio in January.  In fact, in January we are adding some lovely new things to the portfolio, this is just one of them! I should have the first tests back tomorrow, so I think I’ll put a few examples on the blog later in the week.

Finally, I can’t resist it.... here is a new thin metal temple arm I am adding.  This is an 5mm beta titanium arm which we are testing at the moment, with a planned launch at Munich.  I have also created 40 new bloc titanium prototypes to put the arit on.  I will choose 5 or 6 of them to launch with. 

These pictures were sent from the desk of Happy, our Operations Manager at the Workshop (which is how I see new stuff for the first time) and I will have the actual frames in my hands in a few hours and might snap a few more pics for the blog....

We arrived safe and well in Vegas and hot on the back of Silmo in Paris, we slipped straight in to exhibition mode.  One must say that the hotels are rather nicer here than in Paris (I have a small empire for a hotel room, rather than the kitchen sink sized room in Paris - this is my view)

Here is Alistair setting up the computers on the first day of the show.  It is 7am on Day 2 of the show and so it is still early days to see how everything turns out but we are the new boys here so it feels like I've stepped back in time.

That said, the first day was great and paid for the stand, so its all a bonus from here.  Below are the first customers to the stand... this was the last photo I managed to take due to being rushed off my feet.