I’ve been wanting to be able to somehow sell my own prints for as long as I’ve been considering myself kind of like an artist. One of the first platforms I tried using for that sometime back in early 2010s was Society6, and although my designs were crappy, they kept bringing me a spare literal couple of dollars from time to time which made me jump and giggle with excitement.

Later, sometime in late 2010s, I dabbled in creating sticker sets and printing them out in various Moscow and St. Petersburg printing houses to sell online and at physical conventions. But I didn't like depending on the printing houses, so by the end of 2022 I finally set up a simple home printing studio to make stickers myself. A period of trial and error lay ahead but I didn't really get to get things going smoothly having to leave my home county because of the Russo-Ukrainian war.

So I had to think of how I could launch a shop of my own in the new life circumstances.

As for this shop, I’m pretty happy and confident with how it looks and works now. It doesn’t really bring any significant income at this point (hope I won’t forget to update this text if things change) but I see it as some sort of a small legacy of mine as well as an investment, meaning that at some point I’ll have created a really pretty collection of products which expresses my specific aesthetic and speaks to people who share with me a similar aesthetic, ideas or attitudes. If someone finds my products and thinks to themselves that that’s exactly what they wanted to have that means I did a good job!

My shop offers a bunch of products created via print-on-demand drop shippers. I choose one of them for each product depending on what is possible in the case with what service provider. I don’t have a warehouse with my stuff or anything: when someone places an order, it gets produced especially for the client. Shipping rates depend on which one of a number of contractors produces this type of product and where they do that (some have several locations around the world). So, I don’t physically manipulate the products themselves, everything is delegated, but I track and control every order online on every step of the way so don’t worry.

Every time I design a new product I order samples for myself to make sure I’m happy with the quality, and only then products become available at the store.

Shipping is sadly not free. Shipping costs depend on the types and quantity of products you’re ordering and obviously on the destination country. Theoretically I can set up any shipping rates I want at the store, and for example partly “hide” the real shipping costs inside the products’ prices, but that would make prices less fair for those who would have to pay less for shipping based on their destination only. So all the shipping costs you get here are straight up what they are.