The day job has kept me pretty busy as of late alongside some personal matters. It has been pretty difficult to find energy to finish projects that I had thought about completing much earlier in the summer.
Of course, summer is a weird time for anything related to merchandise. As fan conventions came back online you could see people direct their gaze to those places for their basic needs. However, the space I mostly operate in isn’t really impacted by that. Still there were two major pieces of difficult news for working and middle-class Americans — one, the moratorium on evictions largely disappeared and two– most states are now done with any pandemic-related unemployment benefits.
The impact of this on small-scale fan goods purchasers = IDK. The forecast for the months ahead = also an I don’t know. We are not out of the pandemic and if you look at the healthcare situation, we are back in a bad place. While some people on Etsy boards claim record sales over and over (but never say in what btw), while others are tracking lower numbers.
It is true most people had to deal with back to school spending so probably the reality is that there are some issues out there decreasing the ability of people to buy.. what funds they have had to go to buy family supplies and food, but there’s also the very obvious impact inflation is having on food. (My grocery bills are astounding. Rip.)
In any case, I’m posting some photos of things I have recently made or am considering making.
The first up is a pin design which I’ve now filed with the company who handled the previous three. Meanwhile I have decided in spite of the financial risk in making a limited run. If all goes well it’ll be available in late-October for purchase.
I have two standees by two different production companies that I would love to put feelers of interest out for production perhaps in October. They both were experiments in height at 10-11 inches and 9 inches! Look. I have to always try something new when I reach out for prototypes!
I’m still looking around for new things to make, hence the pencil bag pouches for my top six customers in the past two years. I haven’t decided whether to make these available as a shop item. I think I may want to retry them with a white lining before doing that.
In any case, am going to think ahead to Christmas and what I want to do this year. :3
The Swann Lodge 