So, this whole “having an online store” thing is still pretty new to me, and I’m learning a lot as I go along!
The first major thing that I’ve learned is that trying to maintain the “200 most popular names in the last century on t-shirts” was a truly terrible idea. Naively I tried to make it available in as many colors as possible. I tried to keep on top of the constantly slightly shifting prices and stock available – but this meant going through all 200 names and fixing their t-shirts one at a time. Over and over. And over. And over again. It got so bad it started sucking up all of my time, and I was on a never-ending treadmill of small changes needed to keep the product list equating to things that when you bought them would actually exist. So that project is over. I still have all of the artwork and transliterations, and I’m planning on using them for specialized rewards for donations and the like. So, this isn’t completely dead and gone. Just, on a case-by-case basis for special events.
Now that the 200 Names project is scrapped and I’ve cleaned up the mess it left on my servers (and oh boy did it leave a mess. a mess of about 30,000 product images. It took my buddy Lee Peterson jumping in to fix it with some clever coding so that I wouldn’t have to delete those 30,000 images one at a time, THANK YOU SO MUCH) um. Anyways. Now that that mess is cleaned up, I’ve started making new products! I’m not sure what kinds of things you guys will want, so I posted some things that I thought were cute.
I added the cover-art from my Neo-Sindarin textbook, which was painted by my lovely wife, to the backs of t-shirts, as well as one version which just has that artwork on it because I find it pretty. It’s also now on Samsung and iPhone cases as well.
I added “The best journeys are always unexpected,” onto two more bags – a laptop bag and a drawstring bag. Here’s what the drawstring bag looks like:
Then I took some cute stock photos of cats and dogs being friends and made coffee mugs that say “Yes, my dog/cat is best,” in Quenya.
And last (but not least) I made a shirt that in no uncertain terms outlines Tolkien’s feelings about Nazis. You know. That he hated them. Kinda obvious, but in this day and age, it needs to be said. When that shirt was auto-posted to my Facebook page, already one little Nazi outed themself. I also hate Nazis by the way. No only am I so gay that I’ve been married to a woman for 11 and a half years, I’m descended from Jewish Holocaust survivors. And I’m Autistic. You know, a list of things that Nazis want to murder me for.
So, let me know what you think of these new products! Also, is there some product that you’d like to see? I’m using the print-on-demand service Printful. Here is their page of custom products: Custom printed & embroidered products and you can let me know if you’d like to see one of the existing designs on something else, or something you’d like to have written in Tengwar or Cirth on a product. Do you want me to cross fandoms? Get my hands on more artwork? Do more of my photographs? Translate famous LotR movie quotes? Let me know!
Márienna!