Picture this you're running a successful online business, you're making thousands of dollars a day, probably living in some beachfront villa and some paradise tropical island in who knows where, and life's pretty good.
I mean, that sounds pretty sweet to the average person, right?
Well, here's what the reality of running an online business has been like in my experience, as a 17 year old story starts.
When i was still a little kid, i was always obsessed with numbers, selling things and our local garage sale.
I started off with a classic lemonade stand and i transitioned to selling origami online and eventually flipping and selling things on ebay.
Fast forward to last year, i had around 343 subscribers and i thought this would be the perfect time to start selling merch.
I'd always been interested in design, clothing and just overall things that i found a and so I was like great, this is, this is gonna be it.
You know like everyone is gonna love my designs, my clothing, and I'm gonna be super successful and it'll be awesome.
It'll be great.
And yeah, only six people bought something.
Shout out to those people, you know who you are.
But I still wasn't making thousands of dollars a day, living in a villa on some beachfront estate in a tropical island in who knows where.
And obviously it's not all about making money.
That's just sort of the irony that comes behind saying you run an online business and that's just what you picture and that's what we see online and that's just sort of what's portrayed through social media.
You see people working with their laptops on some private beach, beautiful home and who knows where, making thousands of dollars a day through shopify or something.
So that's what i'm kind of touching on.
Anyway, fast forward to the end of 2019.
My channel started to gain some real traction and I was starting to find that I had a real community of people on my channel.
It was a really exciting feeling and I wanted to figure out a way to sort of build a community on my channel and then see if we could create some sort of brand and something around that.
And after hours and hours and hours, and hours and hours and a few more hours of brainstorming, I finally came up with the idea of what I like to call Perspectopia.
It combines the words perspective and utopia.
My whole vision behind Perspectopia is for it to be a metaphorical sort of city or place in our minds where we can sort of go there when we're seeking optimistic perspective on anything in our lives.
Sort of like an escape for anyone no matter where you live and who you are.
You can close your eyes, sort of imagine you're in Prospectopia with other people seeking an optimistic perspective on things.
So I came up with that and I created an online Discord server where you can chat with people all over the world around different subjects and anything you're interested in, and so i decided to transition that into a clothing brand so that people could wear and express the sort of perspectopian vision that i had in mind.
And so, with this new envision that i had for perspectopia, i thought it'd be a perfect time to try the whole business thing, and that's sort of the trend whenever you want to start a business usually won't be very successful the first time.
You have to keep on trying and trying and trying and eventually something will click, and that's what I did.
So I decided to order a hundred champion hoodies for the first round of perspectopia, and they sold out in less than nine minutes, which was unbelievable, especially because my audience is predominantly international and I was only accepting orders from the United States, So that just blew me away and it was like holy cow, maybe I really have something here.
There's people behind the idea, the envision of Perspectopia.
They love it, they want to wear it, rep it and they're really excited about it.
So I took that momentum and a couple months later now it is May I launched the spring collection for Perspectopia.
This is one of the shirts in the drop, as well as the white everyone t-shirt and also the lavender be a part.
T-shirt with the ship number of 35 I only sold 35 of these so each sleeve will have a number of 35 Which is what I'm working on actually right now also in the drop there is this black prospectopia hat i embroidered the sort of the rainbow colors onto it as well as the three ships on the back i have it in black as well as beige the one little ship on the back but it's a very nice quality hat and as you see my arm here i have a prospectopia temporary tattoo All orders are for $35, get a free tattoo.
So yeah, that's my short little promo of what's for sale in the spring drop.
Hats, shirts and also in some of the orders, I'm giving away free hand sanitizer because we are in a pandemic and gotta stay safe.
If you want to go to perspectopia.com, there's still a few items left.
If you want to get them, I ship everywhere in the world.
And yeah, back to how it all works.
And if you're wondering how I get all those products, it's basically just hours and hours of online research, finding the place and kind of do what I want with the right colors, materials and quality.
There's no real easy way to do that.
It just takes a lot of time and emails and phone calls.
So that ends up taking many, many hours.
It's not as hard as you think.
It just takes a lot of time.
And so if you are one of the people who ordered the Be Apart tea in blue or lavender, you'll see that there is a holographic ship.
So yeah, I just spent the last getting all these ships into Photoshop, putting the text in and then basically warping it and stretching it, getting it to fit within the little bubble.
And I did that with all 35.
I bought this machine, which allows me to etch out any design that I load into the software.
Alright, so you can see right here, I have all the ships highlighted.
I'm going to increase the threshold so that everything I want to be cut out is cut out.
So right around 94%.
So once that's done, I'll go out.
Now that that is all ready, we can click send and send mirrored.
And this machine is going to be very loud and it's going to take a pretty long time to do all the ships.
Okay, so this machine has finished its job.
Gonna roll them out like this.
Looks like everything worked for the most part.
Okay, so not perfect. but good enough for now.
So the next part requires a dangerous material.
Exacto knife, so I actually have to pick out all the pieces, which takes a fair amount of time, but Part of the process the handmade aspect to the clothing that I really love about the brand.
Obviously I could outsource the shirts and just have a logo on them and have that be it.
But I really like the personal touch and time that I can put into each piece because I think that makes it really special and shows that I care and that the brand means something to me.
So yeah, that's why I like to put in the extra time, quality, homemade love into the shirts.
But yeah, this is the behind the scenes that you don't necessarily see.
Okay, so it has been a couple of days now since I first started etching these out.
I'm very happy and proud to announce that I finally finished it.
Probably took about at least four to five hours to do them all.
And so as I've been doing the ships every day, we've been shipping out a ton of items.
So we're about 75 done, shipping everything out except for the blue and lavender t-shirts, which I'm going to do today.
Okay, so I'm gonna give a little behind the scenes reality check.
Obviously running a clothing brand seems really fun and it is most of the time, but unfortunately a lot of the time you spend doing things ends up being like small little issues that end up holding the whole production.
So right now I need to actually download and print out everyone's tracking sheet.
But essentially you guys can see this right here i'm trying to do the shipping configuration, but my software isn't letting me estimate any of the pricing, which means i'm not able to ship anything out.
So yeah, that's why there are delays sometimes, because the software doesn't always run perfectly.
So that's what i'm trying to troubleshoot right now, and i probably spent the last 30 minutes doing that, probably take another 30 minutes to an hour.
So yeah, that's sort of a reality check of what it's actually like to run a clothing company Rrrrr.
Ah!
