Justyna

Most popular apparel colors in my store

When people buy things in my Fox Shiver store, these are the most popular apparel colors:

The “Other” group consists of: Green, Yellow, Oatmeal, and Purple. Surprisingly, Pink is way more popular than Purple.

Social interactions…

Now that there’s a pandemic, we spend more time alone, we see our friends and family less often. And yet, some days, I still feel like this:

Cut & Sew T-Shirts

Cut & Sew T-shirts are t-shirts that can be printed all over, like that:

Threadless recently wrote an article about different types of Cut & Sew designs. Read it here: 6 Design Ideas for the Cut & Sew T-Shirt.

Of those 6 types, I mostly have one type in my store: all-over patterns. And only 10 of my designs are available on Cut & Sew t-shirts. These are the most popular in my store:

Cut & Sew t-shirts are, of course, more expensive than usual t-shirts, so they are rarely bought. Only 67 people bought Cut & Sew t-shirts with my designs.

For example, this one has only been bought 3 times:

I will likely never meet anyone wearing it 🙂

We are bad at judging our own work

I made a lot of designs, and sometimes I hesitated before publishing some of them. I never know how something is going to be received. Sometimes I think, “no one is going to buy it, what’s the point”. But by now, I also know that it’s impossible to predict how well a design is going to sell.

Take this Space design as an example:

I think I first submitted it to my Threadless store, where I sent most of my designs. It wasn’t very popular. But I knew that sometimes different websites have different audiences — what might sell well on Threadless might not sell on, say, TeePublic or Redbubble, and vice versa. So I added this design to my Redbubble store. And it has been selling very well there. It’s my most popular design on Redbubble, and I often get messages from customers when they buy it. Here are some of them:

This is going in my husband’s space-themed reading nook for his birthday. Wonderful job guys!
Thank you. My future space travel buddy will love this 😉
Perfect for my next astronomy courses.
Love the simplistic design!!
Absolutely love this design, can’t wait to receive my phone case – thank you for your creativity!

Those are all comments from people who loved the design. And there are many more. Whenever I read the messages I am always surprised — they not only liked my art enough to buy it but they also took the time to write to me! Just imagine — had I listened to my inner voice telling me not to publish it, those people would not have an opportunity to see the design and get something they liked so much. They sometimes even thank me for creating the design, when it should be me thanking them for supporting me.

We artist notoriusly doubt ourselves. This is maybe the most accurate visualization of all this:

Artist: stuffman Source: the-artist-putting-a-simple-cake-next-to-a-much

Summer Paws is on Switch

Over a year ago, my brother and I made a game titled Summer Paws and released it on Steam. Then a publisher reached out to us and offered to release our game on Switch. We agreed and so they prepared the build, tested it, submitted it to the Nintendo store. Our game got approved, and as of two days ago it’s finally for sale and can be played on Switch.

The publisher also prepared the cover image which is displayed in the store:

I am glad they made all the promotional assets, and we didn’t have to do much. That’s actually the reason why we agreed to work with a publisher instead of releasing our game on Switch ourselves — we simply don’t have time to deal with all that stuff since we are now working on other projects.

Here’s the link to Summer Paws on Switch.

And here is a link to Summer Paws on Steam.

NO.

My new design:

I drew it after reading this. I recommend you read it if you have trouble saying ‘no’ as I have. Now that I think about it, saying no — and, as a result, disappointing people — is a complex issue, and I will write more about it in a separate post.

Stop that

The other day I was at a hairdresser’s, and a woman sitting next to me was complaining about everything, and I mean everything. That she had to cook dinners and it took a lot of time and she hated it. That it rained too much. That these were difficult times. That it was too hot on sunny days. That women were shallow and cared too much about their looks. That men preferred those kinds of women.

Real-life situations often inspire my designs. I had to suffer listening to all that, but at least I knew what I wanted to draw when I got home:

That reminds me of an article I once read: “How Complaining Rewires Your Brain for Negativity”. It’s worth reading, but in case you don’t read it, here’s a relevant quote:

Repeated complaining rewires your brain to make future complaining more likely. Over time, you find it’s easier to be negative than to be positive, regardless of what’s happening around you. Complaining becomes your default behavior, which changes how people perceive you.

Who gets more clothes?

I went back to the sales data that I exported from my main Threadless store. Out of curiosity, I queried how many of all the sold clothes are men’s, women’s, or kids’ clothes.