“Knock Knocker Scribbles” is a new column under our “In It for the Money” category, where you can get to know the Knock Knock team—from creative to sales to logistics to . . . everything! Each week, someone in the office fills out a questionnaire. They are given a day to complete it to their liking, with scrawls, scratch outs, doodles, and all.

Click the pic for an even closer look:

In ten minutes, we plan to blast “U Can’t Touch This.” And Rex, you must dance like it’s “Hammertime.”

The Knock Knock team can firmly agree there aren’t enough hours in a day. Thank god leap day is tomorrow. That means we have an extra twenty-four hours to play with.

Leap day is like a second-hand New Year in an offbeat way. If your routine has started to feel monotonous, why not use the day to refresh and start a project you’ve placed on the backburner? Or why not tap the frontiers of local places you’ve never trekked to before?

Here are some ideas if you’re having a creative dry spell:

1.  Write something—anything! We know National Writing Month is November, but penning a novel is evergreen. You can try Nanowrimo.com to start planning and tracking your story, or Figment.com to compose pieces of any length, including poetry and short stories. The latter site connects you with other writers and authors so you can share and receive sound feedback if you’d like.

For a physical writing playground, use the Ideas Kraft Journal.

Get your figment on.

2. Do a good deed. You get one point if the deed is for others and two points if it’s for you. It’s cliché, but paying it forward does have its intrinsic rewards, like, say, not being a complete asshole? Dailyfeats.com is a win for keeping track of your positive actions, and it doesn’t hurt that the site extrinsically rewards you for your efforts as well. Score.

For even more self-help, use The Self-Help Smorgasbord.

Complete a feat.

3. Cook or bake something you can’t even pronounce. Whether it’s a success or a compete failure, it’ll be an awakening for your taste buds. Other than the standard Allrecipes.com and Simplyrecipes.com, try perusing Thekitchn.com for meal ideas and Smittenkitchen.com for cavity-inducing treats.

For assistance in the kitchen, use the Cook This! Pad.

Feed yourself.

4. Get crafty. DIY projects are just plain fun. There’s no other explanation. If you want to revamp a garment that’s been gathering dust in your closet or you want to reorganize your space MacGyver-style, try Designsponge.com’s DIY section. Each project is broken down according to cost and difficulty so you know what you’re getting into before you jump in.

For a smart DIY companion, use the Idea Life Log.

Do something.

5. Travel somewhere, anywhere. Only skip the darkened alleys and unnerving prisons. A good way to explore your locale would be to go Geocaching, which is, according to Geocaching.com, a “real-world, outdoor treasure hunting game using GPS-enabled devices.” This is the perfect opportunity to gather some friends and fulfill your childhood dream of reenacting The Goonies.

For planning your getaways, use the Travel Life Log and Pack This! Pad.

Find some treasure.

There are a plethora of sites like the ones listed above. What’s your favorite project-inspiration site? Tell us in a comment!

According to the Journal of Consumer Research, Inc., your average Joe is more likely to trust a company when fine-grained numbers, as opposed to rounded numbers, are involved in “quantitative expressions.” Our guess is that these “expressions,” are a fancy way of saying marketing and advertising lingo.

This study makes us feel like we’ve been ahead of the game all along (unknowingly). See, we usually share in our catalogs the number of items sold for several products. Just take a look at snippets from our Spring 2012 catalog:

Another interesting factoid from the study:

“Not surprisingly, recipients prefer narrow intervals, which provide more information. Moreover, they are willing to sacrifice formal accuracy for informational value. For example, when the true value is $22.5 billion, 80% of participants prefer the estimate ‘$18–$20 billion’ over the estimate ‘$20–40 billion,’  even though the latter interval includes the correct value, and the former does not (Yaniv and Foster 1995).”

Case in point: precision is pleasing, plain and simple. And so is alliteration.

This Sunday night, we plan to bring out our fancy doilies, sip champagne, eat pita chips, and tune in as classical music abruptly cuts off distinguished stars’ speeches. The latter is the only Academy Awards® prediction we bet on. (Nevertheless, it’ll certainly be a grand time.)

Did you happen to watch any of the nine movies nominated for Best Picture? If you did, you must’ve noticed a few surprise cameos—product cameos, that is. Having our stuff in every single movie nominated for the highest honor—what are the odds, right? Here are screen shots so you can see them yourself:

1. The Artist

2. The Descendants

3. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

4. The Help

5. Hugo

6. Midnight In Paris

7. Moneyball

8. The Tree of Life

9. War Horse

Also, we know it’s not up for Best Picture, but our All Out Of Pad actually is (for real) in a film nominated by association (Melissa McCarthy is up Best Supporting Actress for Bridesmaids!). And we think that’s rad.

. . . Anyways, have a marvelous weekend, FOKKers!

“Knock Knocker Scribbles” is a new column under our “In It for the Money” category, where you can get to know the Knock Knock team—from creative to sales to logistics to . . . everything! Each week, someone in the office fills out a questionnaire. They are given a day to complete it to their liking, with scrawls, scratch outs, doodles, and all.

Click the pic for an even closer look:

. . . Sharp penmanship. And don’t worry, Elyse. We won’t tell anyone about your “sick” days.

Just a reminder: you can follow Knock Knock on Tumblr, which plays hub to our original content. And as always, sharing posts on Facebook or retweeting on Twitter is surely welcomed!

Can you believe it’s nearly the end of the month? We want to wrap up our Reality Rhymes posts (love-related posts, that is) with this ditty. (We know, we know. Valentine’s Day is over and done with, but why not continue to spread the love? Or get a head start on next year?)

Fourscore and nearly seven days ago, we began offering a free Knock Knock goodie bag, which included “mystery swag,” for all $30 orders and above. If that ambiguous incentive doesn’t entice you enough, we don’t know what will (or do we?!).

The freebie package is worth $20 and its contents are super-freaking cool. (If this is the first time you’ve heard of this special, sign up for our mailing list to get in the know! It’s on the bottom-left corner of our homepage.)

Today is the last day of this special, so take advantage of it and of us!

We’re number one fans of our fans. (We’re sure you know how much you contribute to our existence.) So we want to thank you all with a column dedicated to you: “FOKKer Fridays”! Once a month, we will be featuring a certain FOKKer and their Knock Knock stuff-related stories.

Earlier this month, we had an impromptu blog contest to celebrate the release of our Spring 2012 products. The very first entrant (and an unbeknownst winner) loved our Office Speak Pencil Case since it could help with his crafting, including organizing the supplies he uses to make these magazine envelopes. (It really is a rad idea, and we’re psyched to try it out ourselves!)

The winner, Martin, told us if he won, he would send us “before” and “after” pictures showing how he’d use our pencil case. Lo and behold, a few weeks later, we received his thank-you note that included not only pictures, but paper knickknacks that remind us exactly why we love our FOKKers.

So we’re dedicating February’s FOKKer Friday to him! Check out what he snail mailed us:

1. Thank-you letter. (Hey there, Knock Knock Lover Boy!)

2. “Before” and “after” pictures. Plus, they’re Polaroid-esque! The vintage nerd in us totally flipped out.

3. Slang Flashcard. (This an old-school flashcard, so this proves he’s been a longtime FOKKer.)

4. Magazine envelope. This illustration is oh-so Venice.

5. A handsome photo of himself.

As you can tell, we adore this! Thanks again, Martin!

We spotted these vintage book clocks neatly arranged in front of a boutique located a block away from Knock Knock headquarters:

These home décor finds are by Vintage Book Clocks (appropriately named). We appreciate how they marry the tangible book with the hands of an analog clock—two items continuing to inevitably drown in the digital world.

However, as we continue to slide pages of our e-books and fiddle with phones smarter than the majority of our graduating high school class, seeing this item is a refreshing reminder of “the good old days.” (You know, the days when we collected eclectic bookmarks and read the time without regard to VFD, LED, LCD, LSD, whatever.)

Our office is currently brimming with cardboard boxes filled with Clump-o-Lump samples.

This is a poor man’s panorama, but it’s just a little taste of the overbearingness. We look forward to sorting through it all tomorrow morning.

Our director of manufacturing, Elyse, and our operations associate, Paul, counting to make sure all is there. Or are they secretly painting on the cardboard?!

And here is the entrance to the cardboard box maze: