When I opened my store, Fox Shiver, I thought it was going to be full of foxes. I planned to draw a lot of foxes during winter, in the forests and caves. Somehow I ended up making designs with cats instead, and only occasionally some other animals. But yesterday I made a new design with a fox.:
The design makes use of negative space for the fox’s form— it means that the fox is not really painted, but the trees are erased in such a way that a fox is shown.
When I opened one of my stores a few years ago, I planned to draw little foxes and put them on t-shirts and tote bags. It was supposed to be dark and weird art, the foxes would all be alone in forests and caves, at night. And it would be winter.
I named the store: Fox Shiver.
Here is the first fox that I painted:
After the initial spree of dreary fox designs, I somehow ended up drawing lots of cats. I didn’t make a second separate store for my cat designs — I just published them to my Fox Shiver store.
It would be great to have a thematically consistent store with a fantastic name. But what’s even better is to actually open a store with any name that comes to mind and start publishing and selling.
When you look around, you will notice that plenty of people didn’t overthink their store names either. Go through the stores on any of the websites, and you will see lots of artists who often used a combination of words that they liked or simply their name or nickname.
One of my favorite artists is Nathan W. Pyle. If you don’t know him, here is one of his designs:
Guess what’s the name of Nathan W. Pyle’s store on Threadless.
Here’s another artist that I like: Martina Scott and her store.
You don’t need a perfect name for your store, you need to make art and share it.