The gift boxes had a plan (before the pack got involved)

December in the haus means one thing on top of everything else: client gift boxes. Every year we spend a week hand assembling them ourselves instead of outsourcing to a fulfillment house, because "thanks for building with us" should feel like something a person actually packed, not something a warehouse shipped. This year we set up the assembly line in the open loft: a table for ribbon, a table for cards, a table for the boxes themselves, and forty-plus client names on a list taped to the wall.

Then Hudson wandered in around ten in the morning, saw a room full of new smells and open boxes, and immediately understood this as an invitation. He wasn’t wrong, exactly. We just hadn’t meant to send one.

Hudson greets, Houston steals, the assembly line adjusts

Hudson took his usual approach: full-body greeting for every person at every table, whether they’d seen him twenty minutes ago or not. That part we expected. What we hadn’t planned for was Houston clocking the ribbon table from across the room and deciding forty spools of red satin ribbon were, functionally, forty toys nobody had wrapped for him yet.

He took the first spool clean off the table and made it about six feet before anyone noticed, ribbon trailing behind him like he was leading a parade nobody asked for. By the time someone caught up, he’d unspooled a solid twelve feet of it across the floor and looked, genuinely, proud of the accomplishment. We retied what we could. We wrote off the rest as inventory shrinkage and moved the remaining spools to a shelf Houston can’t reach, which took two tries to find.

“Houston doesn’t steal things to keep them. He steals things to see what happens next. Twelve feet of ribbon later, I can confirm: what happens next is somebody’s Tuesday gets more interesting.”

Devon Reyes, Motion & Photography Lead

Hatchi meets the tower

Saphi and Hatchi were in town for the week, which meant the full pack was on site for gift-box season, an event we should have flagged as a risk earlier than we did. Saphi handled it the way Saphi handles everything: she found a corner with a clear sightline to all three tables and supervised without touching a single box.

Hatchi did not supervise. Hatchi saw a tower of assembled boxes stacked four high near the shipping table, decided it looked like something worth investigating at speed, and clipped the bottom box hard enough to send the whole stack sliding. Six finished gift boxes hit the floor. Tissue paper went everywhere. One box lost its lid entirely and skated halfway across the loft with Hatchi in pursuit, thoroughly convinced this was a game specifically invented for her.

“We built this whole day around a very simple plan, and Hatchi looked at that plan the way she looks at every plan, which is to say she had immediate, aggressive notes.”

David Keyes, Founder & CEO

The card nobody saw coming

We rebuilt the tower. We re-tissued the boxes. We were, by early afternoon, actually back on schedule, which felt like a small miracle given the morning we’d had. Then someone set the finished master card, the one good copy we were using to guide every handwritten note inside forty client boxes, down on the ribbon table for exactly four seconds while they answered the phone.

Four seconds was enough. We won’t say which dog. We will say that when we came back, the card had a very distinct, very final crease straight through the center, a fresh corner missing, and what appeared to be the beginning of a chew mark working its way in from one edge. The deadline for these boxes to ship was less than twenty-four hours away. We had exactly zero backup cards.

Nobody in the loft said anything for a second. Then somebody started laughing, because at this point in the day, what else was there to do. Part two continues tomorrow.