Justyna Dorsz

How to get a $250 gift code from Threadless

I have a lot of designs and all of them are uploaded to my Artist Shop on Threadless, and sometimes I submit them to Threadless competitions. Every once in a while Threadless selects one of the designs to add to their main store and then they send me a $250 gift code.

What do you need to do to get your own gift code? Follow these steps:

  1. Upload a lot of designs. And by “a lot” I mean A LOT. At least 30, but aim at 50. The more designs you have, the higher chance that one of them is selected by Threadless. Submit them either to your Artist Shop or to Threadless competitions.
  2. Wait.
  3. But don’t do nothing. Keep sending designs.
  4. One day Threadless will accept one of your designs to include in their main store and they will send you a $250 gift code and you can spend it on whatever you want on Threadless. And you also get royalties for each item sold with your design.

That’s it. That’s all you have to do. Don’t overthink it — just draw something and submit. Repeat.

Good luck!

The most incredible book you have never heard of

My favorite book of all time is “Little, Big” by John Crowley. I bet you haven’t heard of it. I have never met anyone who read it or even heard about it. And that’s crazy! The book is so weird and unique and amazing that it should be as popular as, say, “Game of Thrones”. Yet, no one knows about it. I blame the cover — look at this:

“Little, Big” by John Crowley

It’s like the publisher doesn’t want to sell the book. The cover brings to mind those Jane Austen’s or Bronte’s novels about a heroine living in the victorian era and trying to get married. It’s completely not what this book is about. Though, it is a love story. In part.

The book’s genre is, I think, magical realism. It can remind you about “One Hundred Years of Solitude” in places but it’s very different.

On one hand, I want to recommend this book to everyone. It’s a beautiful story, I loved it, it’s a book like no other, I want more people to know about it. On the other hand, the story is strange and difficult. And then there’s the ending — I think I still haven’t processed what actually happened there. It makes me feel like I recommend something I don’t understand.

Try it, read a chapter or two. I knew from the first chapter that I wanted to read the whole book.

Sabotage

Recently someone asked for opinions about their designs. But they insisted on receiving “positive feedback only”.

What do you say to that? My standard response is, of course, to stay silent. If they haven’t asked for honest feedback, then it’s pointless to impose my opinion on them.

But I can’t help feeling that they are sabotaging themselves this way. They could ask for honest feedback, consider it, learn from it. If they don’t want to hear any criticism, how are they going to improve?

Sales are worth it

Websites, where I sell my designs, run site-wide sales every few weeks. Everything is discounted, sometimes as much as 50%.

I know some artists complain about it. When there’s no sale we earn around 25% of the price of an item. When there is a sale we get less, often as low as 10%.

But sales bring in more customers, so more items are sold. In fact, we all earn more money during sales, even though we get paid less per item.

Unfortunately, none of the apparel websites show sales graphs so we can’t see clearly that sales are worth it. It would be great if they implemented it. But for now, I can show you a sales graph for games sold on Steam.

This is a graph showing units sold of all our games:

Steam Sales Data for Manic Hyena games
Manic Hyena games – units sold

Each spike is during a sale. The first spike is the Summer Sale – it’s one of two big events during the year. The smaller spikes are during less significant events, like Weekly Deal. But even the smaller sales bring in a 5x increase in the volume of sold games.

A graph for apparel sales would look similar. I will see if I can export the data and create my own graphs. Stay tuned.

My designs continue to surprise me

The image below shows my best-selling designs this past month. Not Today continues to be on top:

Top Pending Sales on Threadless this month.
My top designs on Threadless this month

As usual, 6 out of 10 best designs are about cats.

Weekly Notes and the last day of February

All my days are so busy. I don’t know how other people do it, it seems everyone manages their time better than me. Lately, I’ve been constantly overwhelmed by how much work I have, by all those tasks on my to-do lists. It’s already the end of February and I haven’t even started on my bigger projects that I planned for this year.

Weekly Review
  • I moved to a new apartment — I now have hot water and other magical inventions.
  • We are preparing our game Summer Paws for release on two more platforms. So far it’s only available on PC via Steam. We signed a few NDAs so I am not actually sure if I am allowed to say which platforms but I will definitely be allowed to say in a month or so.
  • My lawyer sent more requests to illegal sellers of my designs. Some of them have already paid compensations and stopped selling products with my designs.
  • I opened an online apparel store for my mom so that she can earn some additional income.
Plan for Next Week
  • Still more work to be done with Summer Paws. That’s the priority.
  • Need to order some things for my new apartment. Like a laundry basket and utensils.
  • I need to add more listings to the online store that I opened for my mom.

Uninterrupted work

What I like best is when I have a few hours of completely uninterrupted work, either programming or drawing. No emails, no phone calls, no Facebook. I just watched an interview with Brandon Sanderson, a fantasy author, and he says the same thing, but about writing. He says he likes to have two 4-hour long sessions of work when there are no distractions, he’s just by himself and he writes.

The whole interview is very inspiring:

He says that writing is his passion, and even if he wrote 100 novels and none of them were published, he would be fine with that. It’s so rare to hear someone say something like that.

Travis moment

Travis was a chimpanzee adopted by two people, Sandra and Jerome. They raised him and treated him as if he were their child. Travis lived at their home, ate at a table with the family, rode in their car, watched tv, helped around the house. What Travis did one day can’t be summarized better than what Wikipedia wrote so I am quoting it here:

[Travis] in February 2009, mauled a friend of his owner in Stamford, Connecticut, blinding her while severing several body parts and severely lacerating her face.

– Wikipedia

The woman that was attacked knew Travis well, was a family friend, visited often. I was thinking about it today. About how a single moment can change your life so dramatically.

I felt somewhat silly going to my friends’ place this afternoon to take a shower. Maybe I was being paranoid, I don’t know. My water heater has been acting weird lately, emitting a sort of gurgling noise. The previous water heater that was here blew up — like, literally exploded. The plumber who came to fix the sink one time told me a story of another water heater that blew up.

I wrote to the landlord to let her know that the water heater was malfunctioning, she wrote back “don’t worry, it won’t blow up”.

Maybe it won’t. I don’t know. But maybe it was my Travis moment, maybe I would have taken a bath, the water heater would have exploded, and I would have been blinded, or paralyzed, or dead.

Yesterday I found a new apartment. Tomorrow, I am moving.

Don’t Panic

I see a lot of artists worried about low sales these past few weeks. Don’t panic! That’s completely normal this time of year. I’ve been a designer since 2012, and it has always been like that. February and March are just very, very slow months.

Maybe this year is a bit slower than the previous ones. The pandemic impacted people’s finances, no one really has spare cash to spend on art and clothes. That being said, even if this year is worse than the last one, it’s not that much worse. I expect sales will pick up in late March.

Speaking of March, have you heard that Threadless will pay double for every regular t-shirt sold during March? That will certainly be a boost in earnings as t-shirts are the most often bought product.

If you don’t have a Threadless shop, you should start one now and start earning money. Sign up here. And read more about double earnings during March on Threadless Blog.

I hired a law firm (Update #2)

One thing that’s been on my mind recently is this whole situation with illegal sellers.

In December, I hired a lawyer and we sent requests to 19 people to stop selling my designs and pay me compensation. Recently, we’ve sent requests to 17 more people. But I’ve already found more. The most stolen one is: “Not Today”, followed by “Overthinking and also hungry”. Lately, people have been stealing my “All These Feelings” and “Vaguely Aware of Social Norms” too.

Designs stolen most often

This feels like it’s not going to ever end. As soon as we deal with illegal sellers, new ones show up. Some of the people contacted by my lawyer didn’t remove the listings with my designs. One person removed the listings, paid the compensation, and then started selling my design without permission again. All those cases will need to be resolved in court.

We have selected a few companies to sue first but one of them unexpectedly paid part of the money that they owed. That was a nice surprise — if they pay the rest, then it’s one less person to deal with.

Of all those people, the most upsetting is one company. I don’t want to say the name yet because it’s still possible that they will make it right. I used to buy clothes and shoes from them. I liked them! They are really huge — during Christmas when I visited my mom I saw their TV commercials. They can afford to hire artists and pay them. And yet, they stole two of my designs and didn’t pay me.