Justyna

My most summery design

It’s so hot outside. Here’s my most relevant design:

This is not a popular design — it has just reached $100 in total sales. That’s not much, but I like this design, it’s so pleasant to look at.

First Sale!

Someone bought a t-shirt from my new TRUFFLEPIG store!

To give you some context — I opened my store 3 days ago and have uploaded 11 designs so far. Of course, I know it is luck — someone noticed my design among thousands and liked it and bought it. But you might be just as lucky if you open your own store. The more designs you upload, the greater chance that someone will buy something from you.

It might seem like a humble start — one t-shirt sold. However, this is exactly how it was in the beginning when I opened my Fox Shiver store. I didn’t have huge sales from the start. But one by one people visited my store and bought something. I kept adding new designs, and earnings were increasing month by month. You can do the same — open an Artist Shop and add a few designs. Don’t get discouraged by a slow start. Keep making designs, and be patient.

If the person who bought the t-shirt reads this blog — thank you!

Cat with flowers

I drew a cat 🙂

It’s, of course, started with a simple sketch on reMarkable:

But then I spent way too much time painting all the flowers. I was thinking it would look good on greeting cards and t-shirts. I added it in my TRUFFLEPIG store.

Best selling products

When you open an Artist Shop on Threadless, you will receive a bunch of emails with tips on how to: promote your store, prepare design files, customize the shop, and so on. Since I’ve created my new store, I’ve been getting those helpful emails too. One of them was titled “And the Best Selling Products are…” and said:

Tees, Mugs, and Totes!
These are the three most popular products across all Artist Shops and could be in yours as well!

I got curious if that’s the case for my stores as well. My new store has been opened for a day only, and I haven’t sold anything there yet, but I sold a lot of products in my main Fox Shiver store. So I exported the data and calculated how many items of each product I sold.

Mugs and Totes are not selling well in my store at all. Tees — on the other hand — are the most popular products by far. I sold more t-shirts than all other products combined. Take a look:

Most popular products in Fox Shiver store on Threadless

TRUFFLEPIG

Today, I opened my new store on Threadless. It’s called TRUFFLEPIG because I like pigs and it’s a funny words. There will mostly be cute and humorous designs there. The main reason why I had decided to start a new store is that my main store, Fox Shiver, has gotten too big and is a mess — there are all kinds of designs there, no consistency.

From now on, I will be adding most of my designs — if they match the style — to my new store. But designs that aren’t funny and don’t have cute animals I will submit to my old store. I am also planning on opening yet another store with a completely different style. But for now, I want to make more designs for TRUFFLEPIG.

Here is my new store: TRUFFLEPIG

And here is my main store: FOX SHIVER

My little cup

Two weeks ago my family and I went to a pottery class to make our own mugs. Then they were to be fired in a kiln and coated in a glaze. We picked them up today. Here is my little cup:

It’s uneven and awesome 🙂 Theoretically, I can drink from it, but I am afraid to break it so I probably won’t.

Bad output

I stumbled upon an interesting tweet by Julian Shapiro. I know it’s a few months old but I liked it so I am sharing it here in case you find it useful too:

The most interesting thing I learned this year is this mental model for generating world-class writing. pic.twitter.com/RE0Rahk3ng
— Julian Shapiro (@Julian) November 15, 2020

To finally start creating good stuff you need to create a lot of bad stuff first. It applies to writing, but also to drawing —a drawing usually needs a few tries too. You draw your first idea, see that it doesn’t quite work, iterate on it, until you arrive at something good.

Pomodoro Technique

You’ve probably heard of The Pomodoro Technique. But for those who haven’t: The Pomodoro Technique is a productivity method where you set a timer to 25 minutes and then focus on work for those 25 minutes, avoiding distractions.

I tried it a few times before, but my timer was just a browser extension that displayed the remaining time in the browser’s toolbar. It was so small and subtle that for me that wasn’t a sufficient reminder that I should be working. I gave up on the technique.

But a few days ago, I’ve read the recent post on the Raptitude blog. Raptitude is one of my favorite blogs, for example, here’s an article about meditation that I enjoyed, and I think is a good summary of why meditation is so useful: Mindfulness is the Opposite of Neediness. Read also “Wise People Have Rules For Themselves”.

Anyway, the latest post on Raptitude is about productivity, and one of the methods that are mentioned as useful is The Pomodoro Technique. I decided to give it a try one more time. But instead of using a browser extension with the timer, I bought a simple physical timer — you can see it in the photo above. The timer is attached to my microphone’s arm, right next to my laptop’s screen, so I see it all the time when I am working. I expect it will be a more effective reminder. I will report back the results after a week or two.