Answer: Who makes that dog? (Oct 20, 2010)

Let’s see… what DO we know about this stuffed puppy? 

By looking at the labels, we know that the importer is probably “ASI”…  something… so let’s start there. 

[ ASI ]

And we see that this is the landing page of the “Advertising Speciality Institute.”  That makes sense, since this is pretty clearly a schwag item—probably made by one of their members. 

So, using their built-in search box (on their page www.asicentral.com) we can search for 62960.  (I’m guessing here that this is the code number for the company that makes the dog; probably a member of the ASI.)   If you click through on that page you on a products.asicentral.com page. 

If you click through to their page, you immediately see that they make small plush stuffed animals as marketing promotions.

And, voila, that’s what it is.  There are three companies (“Adva|lite”  “Toppers” and “it’s all Greek to me” that are collectively owned by The Corvest Family.  The relevant one here is the company named “it’s all Greek to me,” (yes, they have funny upper/lower case) which apparently made the dog. 

If you then search for:

[ ASI “it’s all greek to me” ]  

You’ll quickly find their site www.iagtm.com

BUT... searching on that site is hard/hard/hard!  For some reason, they don’t seem to carry this particular dog on that site.  Hmm. 

So I backed up to Google and did a search for

[ ASI 62960 ]

Went to the first result there.  Now that I know 62960 is the code for “it’s all Greek to me,” I thought that might be useful. 

So I checked that site, searching within http://www.iaspromotes.com/ for:

 [ dog ]  (on the site)

That also was slow going, so I used their option to show more results on the page, expanding it to 60 results per page and clicked until I managed to find an item that looked right.  (This is a common option on catalog pages.  It often makes searching much faster.) 

After scanning the page for a bit, I found my dog! 

I thought it was a generic dog, turns out they call it a “pug.”  Shows you how much I know about dogs. 

One more note. We have the number 8819 from the IASPromotes site, and pulling up product 8819 on It's All Greek To Me ("Chubby Wubbeez", http://www.iagtm.com/product.jsp?id=983), we see that it's a close-out.  (Note also that the last 2 digits of the product code have been dropped.  This is often a trick that manufacturers use—they append digits for their own internal use.

Which is why you can’t find them on the IAGTM.com site…

And THIS leads me to my last search trick. 

If you’re using Google Instant (where it searches as you type), you can notice something very interesting here. 

Do the search [ ASI 62960 8819 ]

now… as you’re typing that last code “8819” (and you don’t KNOW that the last two digits are optional), you can notice that the Pug result shows up in position #1 before you finish typing…

Sometimes persistence pays.  (Looking through multiple pages of results.)

And other times it pays to pay attention.  (Notice the top results as-you-type…) 

Search on… instantly!