65. Bonfire blooper reel, 2024
Our top 5 biggest oopsies from the past year
The other day, in a burst of co-founder enthusiasm and latent savior complex, Kevan made a LinkedIn post calling for freelance writers interested in working with us in the new year as we look to engage with clients on some potential content projects. The result of his 20-word message was 900 comments, 500 connection requests, dozens of Bonfire inbox queries, tens of personal emails, and unknowable loss of time, energy, and focus for not only him but also Shannon as we tried to thank everyone for their interest while also stressing that we didn’t actually have any work to offer anyone right now.
Oops!
It was not our first Oops of the year, and as you can tell by the nature of the Oops, it came from a good place, no one really got all that hurt, and it actually did have the potential to solve a business problem.
We will laugh about this eventually, as we do all of our oopsies.
And we’d like to invite you to laugh along with us!
Rather than a year-end post listing our achievements and reflections, we thought we’d take an unconventional turn and tell you about our bloopers over the past 12 months. Hope you enjoy!
1. Trick or treat! (Spoiler: It’s “trick.”)
We hosted a casual online event on Halloween for some of our close professional contacts, emcee’d by our talented friend Kris Martinez. We encouraged everyone to show up to the Zoom in costume. Kris was dressed as a Yankees player, Shannon was dressed as her anti-social cat that lives under her bed, and Kevan was wearing a blue nylon suit that inflates to look like a giant blueberry.
Two people showed up to the event. (Bless you, Meg and Simon!)
Neither were in costume.
Us:
👁️👄👁️ 👁️👄👁️
Oh, and the topic? “What you need in order to feel safe being silly at work.” The apparent answer? Not being the only people in costume on a Zoom call.
2. Red Hot Chili Buttholes
If you’ve seen any of our other digital presences, you might have seen our main logo:
Our original brand designer, the fantastic Blake Suarez, gave us a rich and diverse set of design elements and the complete creative freedom to explore what worked best, so we took the “O” from that logo to use as a little standalone element in our materials:
We use it everywhere! It’s the favicon of our website, it’s our profile picture on every social media platform, and we gleefully made ourselves buttons and stickers featuring this little symbol. (We also love that it could be a “spark,” and that it looks like the arrangement of logs on a fire from top-down.)
Anyway, we wear these buttons on our backpacks and coats, and we have these stickers on our laptops and notebooks. They catch people’s attention! And more than once, we have been asked the same question:
“So, you really like the Red Hot Chili Peppers?”
Us:
🤨🤔
Them:
Us:
🤦♀️🤦♂️
“Ok, it’s fine!” we said to ourselves. “We’ll just use a different version of this element from another version of our logo!”
“Sorry, but now this…this looks like a butthole,” our friends said.
Us:
👁️👄👁️ 👁️👄👁️
…sooooo, long live the RHCPs!
And note to our future selves: Be careful cherry picking design elements since we are not as self-aware as the pros are. But at least we have honest friends. :)
3. Banking in The Twilight Zone
ICYMI: Shannon lives in France, and Kevan lives in the U.S.
This fall, we opened a French subsidiary of Bonfire for a number of reasons we won’t go into here. But in order to do that, we needed a business bank account at a French bank. Sounds reasonable enough, right?
Well, since Shannon is an immigrant in France, it wasn’t quite so simple. To maximize our chances of being approved for this account, we decided to open the account at the bank where Shannon already does her personal banking in France.
Did Shannon vet and choose this bank? No, because she initially had a different, well-known bank…but then it was bought out by this new one and her account was migrated. Did we do any research into this new bank and whether it was good? No. No, we did not. Were we told that the bank account would be open within 10 days at least 4 times? Yup.
At one point, the immigration authorities needed a document from the business registration authorities, who in turn needed a document from the bank, who in turn needed that same missing document from the business registration authorities to issue their document… A true Joseph Helleresque loop of infernal paperwork. It was like a joke, except it wasn’t. (And all of it was happening in French!)
Us:
🫨😭
Did it take from August until December to actually open the account? Why yes, it did!
4. You, too, can be a celebrity for only $695/yr
Our email inboxes are stuffed with a variety of warm, sincere outreach and also cold, unsolicited outreach; normally we are pretty good at sussing out the relevant from the chaff. Well, one of us is a little better than the other.
Kevan had the honor of being invited to apply to America’s Who’s Who, a list of luminaries compiled into a physical book and digital database, which features said notable people from all walks of life: marketers, sure, but also teachers, athletes, writers, volunteers, academics, librarians, the list goes on and on. In fact, the list goes on and on so long because part of the business model of Who’s Who is to compliment a vast array and huge number of people of interest in the hopes that these people will be encouraged compelled to purchase the books and plaques and other notable artifacts to put on their bookshelves and wrap as Christmas gifts for their families.
Well, guess what Kevan’s family is getting for Christmas!
Kevan’s family:
😬💀
Just kidding, Kevan did not spend the hundreds of dollars for the paraphernalia of Who’s Who. He did say yes to the intro emails and yes to a live phone screen where he was interviewed for his merits, immediately granted admission to the club (note: his merits are not that impressive), then asked pretty directly for the number of leather-bound Who’s Who books he wanted to purchase. Incredibly, he held firm and said, “Zero.”
In the months since this experience, Who’s Who has sent him two more cold outreach requests to his LinkedIn DMs, asking him to apply for Who’s Who, as if his admission were forgotten in their files or, just as probably, his admission did not completely stick because he did not pay for anything. So far, he has resisted the urge to respond to the DMs.
5. Go home, Midjourney; you’re drunk
Every week, this very newsletter has an AI-generated image that represents a quirky scene from the imaginary little world of Bonfire. Since we’re trying to inject more creativity into realms where it’s traditionally or systemically devalued, we depict that metaphorically with Polaroid-type photos of extremely stereotypical business people having a surreal campout experience in the woods, or outdoorsy/artsy elements magically integrated into a stereotypical office environment. Very playful, quite ironic, and a little bit ✨mystical✨.
We think it works for our vibe! But you know what doesn’t always work? Midjourney, the AI image generator we use to create these pictures. (Orrrr maybe we just don’t know how to prompt it properly, tbh.)
The results are sometimes, frankly, horrific. Or they’re nonsensical. Often, they’re just hilarious. To commemorate these cosmic and corporeal horrors, we created a Slack channel to share them called #midjourney-oopsies so that we can remember them forever.
Here are some of our favorite little abominations! While these are not technically NSFW, they’re also not not NSFW? Like, you probably wouldn’t want anyone to know that you’re looking at them. You’ll see what we mean…
And finally, the cherry on top, the pièce de résistance: These women, like the rejects from a Hieronymous Bosch painting, demonstrating that Midjourney has no effing clue how a human eats a carrot. (Recommend zooming in on each face for maximum effect.)
We’re sorry, ok? WE’RE SORRY!
Over to you…
Tell us it’s not just us! What were your funny flops in 2024? Please, don’t leave us hanging!
Happy holidays, and we’ll see you in January!
For more…
Follow us on LinkedIn and on Instagram. Stay tuned to our Substack space for new community features and ways to meet your fellow subscribers.
And let us know if you’d like to go deeper with us to talk about you and creativity. We do:
1:1 coaching and mentorship
Team workshops and consulting for marketing and leadership
Speaking and appearances on podcasts and at events
