CafePress, we have a problem …
One of the problems with Ninth Circle Design stems from one of my initial business decisions – using Print On Demand.
Granted, it makes my life so much easier in not having to deal with payments, shipping, or inventory. Granted, I get random sales from total strangers through CafePress and Zazzle. However, I get basically no sales from anyone I know personally or through any kind of social media or this blog.
One reason for this, I suspect, is that my kind of people mostly are DIY kind of folks. We’re into handmade, and local, and quirky, and community, and all that sort of good stuff that’s totally counter-consumerism. My kind of people mostly don’t buy stuff from Zazzle or CafePress.
I had a little idea …
So, what if I did do my own printing?
In particular, printing my own art – tree sketches and suchlike. It would be handcraft of real handcraft.
A “serious” screenprinting setup is fairly expensive, and the tree sketches simply don’t lend themselves to traditional stenciling, but there’s other options like GOCCO (and now you know what to get me for The Winter Gift-Giving Holiday) and photo-sensitive emulsions. After a lot of waffling, I finally broke down and got a couple screens, a little ink, and some photo-emulsion.
Realizing that I haven’t done anything with screen printing in over two decades, I figured I might want to test it out with a regular stencil I had lying around:
This is the first run of screen printing
I clearly need more practice, but it’s promising.
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