143 - Department Store Part 1
Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
My name is Frankie and I'm addicted to making things.
Design for a bag featuring the rainbow Queen
In 2022 I got breast cancer. It started out with some specs on a mamogram and ended up being stage 2 with a chunk removed. When I put my hand on my hip, the breast looks like a laughing smurf. Luckily I didn't have to go through chemo. It didn't interfere with my life very much though, and during that year I held down my regular freelance job (running my eBay retail store) and, in the continued (flailing) pursuit of being creative and earning a living from it, I built a beautiful 'boutique department store' online, full of glittering virtual products, featuring my own designs.
Some of the Contrado products I designed and offered in my store, featuring the Queen character
This involved a lot of web production, illustration, character design and graphic design. It should have involved a lot of marketing and PR as well, but of course I bounced along as usual producing things and rarely promoting them.
Anyway, I might still have the department store full of best non-sellers but this also went tits up, when Contrado - the production partner - pulled their integration programme.
Queen with topiary mug design
Contrado are a printing and manufacturing company based in West London and they offer the widest range of print-on-demand products I've seen outside of the USA. Everything from bunting to biscuit tins. They are on a par with the American Zazzle and Cafe Press. Print-on-demand is a system that shows a potential customer, an image of a product for sale, and after they have ordered and paid for it, the product (perhaps a white blank such as a white mug or a white T-shirt) is custom printed for them and sent through the post. In another form, it is commonly offered in photo stores, where customers come in with their own photos and choose gifts to print them on.
Contrado offered integration with Shopify (an ecommerce platform). It went like this: I would go to their website, login, pick a product and add my design to it using their web software. I would then use their integration system to make this product magically appear on my own website. When a customer ordered and paid for it on my website, Contrado would get the order, print up the product and ship it off to my customer.
What could possibly go wrong?
Design for a commemorative table cloth