Intro: You are listening to Behind the Ops presented by Tulip 

Russ: Producer Jasmine, I have a lot to say about glitter today.

Jasmine: and I'm ready to hear it. I get to be on producer mic. 

Russ: Yeah, cuz you found, found this glitter mystery. Yeah, the maybe solved glitter mystery.

Jasmine: I knew that Madi would have already seen this and had an opinion on it, and of course, immediately she had a link handy on, um, some sources with some theories that have technically solved the mystery of the glitter shortage.

Russ: Well, sure. That's the, here's the recap, is in 2018, a New York Times story led to some large, you know, large frame weird corner of the internet concerned with glitter mysteries which led to a lot of questions about who the biggest consumer of glitter is, what industry it is, cuz a, a glitter manufacturer refused to call out who their top customer was.

And then fast forward 2019. After having existed on Reddit's Unsolved Mysteries subreddit for several years, there's a podcast outta Boston called Endless Thread that investigates Reddit unsolved mysteries. They, they go into an investigation. What do they find? 

Jasmine: Um, that it's boat manufacturers. 

Russ: Yeah. So they claim, but between 2019 and now, I don't feel like the mystery has died down cuz you found out about this just now.

Jasmine: I found out about this via TikTok as I do all of my news, all of my credible sources come from TikTok, but there were a couple of other theories, one being explosives. I've seen a lot about toothpaste and some about like luxury beach resorts using it in their sand. 

Russ: That sounds appalling. Just get the, get the tiny little bits of plastic as close to the water as possible so they can wash straight in.

Jasmine: Yeah, that would be a problematic answer. Um, Madi is here so she can jump on. 

Russ: Madi, we're coming in hot today and sparkly. I have so many takes about the glitter mystery . 

Madi: Okay. When I first heard this podcast on Endless Thread about glitter, it blew my mind. I was like, very early in my days at Tulip and I was like, what is happening here?

And how many people just like are in family businesses and they have these like special trade secrets. 

Russ: Oh, amazing. So that was, that was 2019. 

Madi: Ish. Yeah.

Russ: And then producer Jasmine resurfaces the glitter mystery 2022 this year. She says, Madi, Russ, there's a glitter mystery and you guys need to weigh in on.

Madi: Love that it was surfaced from TikTok. I, I feel like maybe we start with TikTok algorithm's ability to surface it and this TikTok that she shared. So you have this woman who is potentially tipsily or very excitedly, um, presenting on the glitter mystery at what looks like a PowerPoint party in her home. 

Russ: I gotta start doing those. I gotta start doing those. 

Madi: And she's like, glitter shortage. How is this happening? And then it just takes off. And now here we are. talking about a story that's been on the down low for four years because it's now tikTok trending. 

Russ: It's a Manufacturing story. And what, what amazes me about all of these pieces that I discovered in retracing the steps, the TikTok PowerPoint party, the subreddit about the unsolved mystery, the debunking of the myth from Endless Thread Podcast.

Uh, through and through your amazement about these family businesses with the trade secrets and a machine that's a specialist machine for doing a specific thing, my core hypothesis about this topic is that there's a level of Manufacturing literacy that is a, it's a threshold. It's not a, it's not at all a, a continuum.

You're either there or you're not there. And once you've gotten to this level of Manufacturing literacy, you've heard a thousand of these sort of stories and you, you've seen a thousand of the scandals that fall out from them in obscure little corners of the world, and they've become, So routine and so normal that the only thing that's shocking is that they keep popping up and keep shocking other people.

Hear me out on this. 

Madi: Okay. 

Russ: How is glitter made? 

Madi: Is this a question for me?

Russ: It's an open-ended question. How would you, how would you speculate that glitter is made? Because it's a trick question also, no one knows except the glitter makers who won't tell you. That's part of the mystery. but like speculate here. 

Madi: Something is ground into tiny pieces. And coated in something. Yeah. And it's glitter. 

Russ: Yeah. And we know what the something is cuz we know that glitter is polyethylene aluminum. One of the glitter guys said those words in the Endless Thread podcast. Polyethylene, plastic.

It's a thin plastic sheet. Boom. That's all you need to know. Aluminum, same stuff aluminum cans are made. There's some, some vagaries around you coat the polyethylene sheet with aluminum, and that's what makes it shiny and reflective. There's magic in the details of how that might get you to tiny little, little flakes.

Maybe it's ground, maybe it's cut, maybe it's laser cut, maybe it's cut with a micro water jet. Maybe it's little pieces stamped out. But there are only so many ways that you can go from a combination of a thin plastic. A aluminum powder being coated onto that sheet and then chopping that up into little pieces or chop it up into little pieces and then coat it afterwards.

Like, there's only so many combinations in this jigsaw puzzle. Terrible analogy. There are only so many combinations in this Lego's duplo brick set that you can get to. It's not, it's not an unlimited number of ways to get to glitter.

Madi: Counterpoint. it can still go incredibly wrong even with general description of how to get it done and the ingredients. 

Reference: have you seen great British Bake off technical challenges? 

Russ: Exactly. 

Madi: These are people who know what they're doing, who have the steps, who have the ingredients, and we still get things like the Taco, "Taco" if you're British, I guess, challenge where people just, you know, they're creating things that you would be surprised to see.

Russ: So there's two more pieces here. Another an anecdote from a customer hiring highly skilled technicians. They, it is like elite technicians. I'm not gonna say what the industry even is cuz I'm gonna pull a little bit of industry secret. So, I'm not gonna say what the industry is, but they're hiring veteran journeymen, you know, mechanically adept people from a, a small cadre of other places.

Uh, let's, it, it's not this, but let's say it's like extreme racing sailboats. Okay? Let's just say it's that. Now there's only so many people that work on extreme racing sailboats, and they all are at the top of the, like, they're all PhDs in sailboat mechanics, right? And those people, if they go from one team to another team, if there's a difference in how that sailboat made, They're not necessarily gonna know just because they're an expert at, you know, carbon fiber layup and repair.

They might may not know exactly how that works at the other team. So they have expertise, they are elite, but that doesn't mean they know the exact process at the new place. So the transfer of, not necessarily tribal knowledge, but specific knowledge that is specific to a different set of technicians doing it a different way from the set of technicians that do it the way that they know how to do it.

Cataloging and categorizing and documenting that information and being able to pass it from place to place is really important. 

Madi: So we're talking about the difference between like domain expertise and process understanding. 

Russ: Exactly. You may have amazing domain expertise, and that doesn't guarantee any amount of explicit process understanding.

And that's the same thing with this glitter Manufacturing thing. When I ask you about how to make glitter right, if you get to the point where you have domain expertise in Manufacturing, you can intuit your way to how the set of ways in which glitter would be made right? 

Like you have to cut a very little small piece of plastic. Most likely the plastic was coated beforehand, because otherwise it'll get gummy and the coating won't stick to the sides uniformly, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So then the mystery becomes like, how do you cut a really, really small piece of a of thin plastic that's already been cut, that gets you to, okay, you can use a mechanical motion, like a blade, you can use a laser.

Uh, it's probably not a laser cause that might melt the plastic. But like you could, you, you can narrow it down to what if I had to make glitter, here's all the ways that I would experiment with what that process would look like. And the reason that companies are secretive about, I guess you would call it like the last mile of solving that problem.

You know, the difference between me and a glitter expert is the glitter expert has Manufacturing domain expertise. I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna give myself credit here. I have some domain expertise in Manufacturing. They have day-to-day domain expertise in Manufacturing. The difference between me speculating on a podcast about how this is how you would make it and them making it every day, is that they know the intricate details of exactly how this thing gets done in reality.

And that part, that last mile, that's where the trade secret is. And that's why nobody wants to talk about anything about their specific Manufacturing. But it's like they don't wanna tell you who the customer is. They don't wanna tell you what the process is. They don't wanna tell you any of that stuff because as soon as you tell somebody that last little secret bit, you know the details of what you actually do as opposed to what you could do now, the magic's gone. I feel like the whole mystery gets solved right there.

Madi: That last mile magic. 

Russ: Why? Yeah. Why is everybody so secretive? Because that's just how it works around this business, and by this business, I don't mean the glitter business.

Madi: I, I think that's why there's also just like a lot of very fair, you know, consideration around process as a type of ip, you know?

Russ: Right. and I think they'll tie into the TikTok piece and the, the main like, call it mainstream commentators on industry mystery, particularly when you trace the dots and it comes back to being a Manufacturing mystery.

Like it would be less of a mystery if the people that were, you know, commentating on how the industry works already had Manufacturing domain expertise cuz they would immediately get narrowed down to like, they wouldn't have to spend a long time on what even is glitter? Where does it come from? How does it even get made?

Who even controls the means of production of glitter? You know, they're not thinking in terms of there's a factory somewhere. It has machines in it. The machines make glitter. These are the things that the machines might be, might be doing. These are the next comparable machines that you would go to another machine builder, and here's how you would go specify a new glitter machine if you were to spin up a project to be a glitter startup. 

Like if you and I wanted to be a glitter startup tomorrow, I would know where to go. 

Well, I 

Madi: mean if you listen to this, the margins are really good. So , if it's something that you plan to do, let me know. 

Russ: It's, there's a lot of risk, cuz I have no idea how far that last mile is. We say it's a last mile, but maybe it's, maybe it's a hundred miles. Yeah, maybe it's a million miles. I'm not gonna sink my life savings into chasing the dream of fat, glitter margins when I have so many unknowns in front of me. 

Madi: Could be a glitter tycoon. Russell Glitter Waddell. 

Russ: I don't, I hate that so much. I don't want to do that. 

Madi: You said you had three takes. What was the third one?

Russ: I'm so shook by this now. I can't even remember my third take. 

Okay, fine, fine. 

Madi: Don't put my middle name as glitter. 

Russ: Don't, don't make my middle name glitter. Here's, here's my take on the fly though, is if I was gonna go make a glitter company, Madi and Russ's Glitter Incorporated, LLC. Uh, we would start with defining what we want our glitter to look like.

Then we would go to people that make polyethylene, people that make aluminum, people that do aluminum and polyethylene coating. We would go to a machine builder or someone who knows how to build a machine, probably find somebody small and cheap cuz not trying to go with the highest bidder here. And all of these things are a Google search away.

And I think my, I think my third point as I circle into it, I think my third point was, generally, people are not googling how the business of Manufacturing works. So when they discover that there is a whole set of steps or a whole specialist in making this one thing, or a whole specialist in making the material, that that becomes the glitter.

Or in the, in the pandemic era, we saw all these stories about, you know, how do cotton swabs get made for your nose? How do masks get made? How do ventilators get made? Every single one of these products that is, I would say nichey right up until it's no longer nichey. The ins and outs of where do, where do the raw materials come from? How do the raw materials get turned into intermediate goods? How do the intermediate goods get, you know, turned into to finished goods? How do they get packaged? How do they get distributed? How do they get consumed? How do they get maintained? How do, how do the revisions to the product happen? 

All of that stuff once you've hit manufacturing domain expertise, the threshold, once you have that threshold reached, none of that stuff's really mysterious in the general. It's mysterious in the specific, like glitter may still be mysterious, but it's not. It's not mysterious to where the whole thing feels totally overwhelming.

And mainstream, regular human, as opposed to Manufacturing human knowledge of Manufacturing. I think like that would be a bellwether for me is when, is when we're not getting these mystery stories, you know, everybody can wrap their head around where stuff comes from. Not saying that's how it should be, but like that would be a, that would be an indication that, that people just get Manufacturing.

Madi: Yeah, demystifying glitter, and the interest there is, is really just a, an allegory for demystifying manufacturing, more Manufacturing and how to get it done into the public consciousness. 

Russ: Amazing summary. See you next week. 

Madi: See you next week. 

Outro: Behind the Ops is brought to you by Tulip. Connect the people, machines, devices, and systems used in your production and logistics processes with our frontline operations platform.

Visit tulip.Co to learn more. This show is produced by Jasmine Chan and edited by Thom Obarski. If you enjoyed listening, support the show by leaving us a quick rating or review. It really helps. If you have feedback for this or any of our other episodes, you can reach us at behindtheops@tulip.Co.

Madi: I will say Maddie and Russ's Glitter Incorporated could be Mr. Glitter. Madi and Russ . 

Russ: Holy God yes. 

Madi: Mr. Glitter is our glitter company name. 

Russ: Mr. Glitter. Okay. I'm not, at this point, I'm not joking, if I thought it was cheap to go and get this stuff quoted. This is the type of stuff like I have, there are multiple things that are Manufacturing ish businesses that are in the back of my mind on the shelf, where if I end up at the bar with the right person, I would be like, how do we make a glitter machine?

Madi: Yeah? 

Russ: It would start as a theoretical exercise. But like somebody has to make all of the machines that make all of the things. And if you know who the people are that make some machines, it's just not, it's not intimidating and you just, yeah.

Madi: Machine designers are the CTOs of the future. 

Russ: I got a guy who makes spray tan machines.

Madi: Innovation. 

Russ: Innovation and sprays.