Liminality

David and I had been talking in earnest about building a brand since 2019. I had sketches dating back to 2012 and so did he, and I’d had a run of clumsily designed and spec’ed t-shirts made by a local print provider that I didn’t do much with, being in the midst of a life re-roll that took me to DC.

We had a lot of up-front design work done on the physical objects and prints, testing fabrics, palettes, workflows, framed media, stickers, etc. starting in 2020. But with respect to the branding, or the website, we had very little to show outside a clumsy web store built with our eCommerce provider’s WYSIWYG site builder — as a digital-first brand where the website is a potential customer’s very first impression, the cookie-cutter site wasn’t going to cut it.

We couldn’t reach a consensus on a brand we liked, but I had already gotten a domain that I felt would allow us to create microbrands based on a loose framework of symbols, and the weekend of Labor Day 2023 I began slapping together a site that felt functional and lean compared to what we’d have by other means, leveraging the initial work I’d done on fulfillment and and eCommerce APIs and of course the artwork we’d been creating all along.

At the end of the long weekend it was functional enough to place orders, two weeks later it was live, and three weeks after that I’m starting to run ads and figuring out what ads people seem to respond best to. It’s been fun, and I feel like this is a good, structured outlet for creative energy I'm already expending. On the periphery, there are faint lines of convergence between projects, which is also exciting.