Bye bye telecoda-tees
Last year I created a website for selling my drawings on t-shirts called “telecoda-tees.com”. I had limited success at best selling a handful of shirts and some stickers.
You can see the old site below.
telecoda-tees.com
It was called “telecoda-tees” after my twitter alter ego @telecoda and the fact it sold t-shirts. I saved a bundle on brand advice.
Via my business and marketing genius, I had successfully discovered a niche within a niche.
Imagine the intersection of the following groups:
- people who buy t-shirts online
- people who program in Go (the majority of designs)
- people who like my artwork
- people who have discovered my site
As you can imagine the group was infinitesimally small.
I managed to broaden my designs and they suddenly began to prove VERY popular in Manila. This was my downfall..
Duped
I received a number of orders for multiple shirts based upon my Inktober 2019 designs. Things were looking up. Unfortunately these orders proved to be fraudulent and I had to refund the value and therefore lost the sales. Ironically my day job is working for a startup that specialises in fraud detection so I really should’ve known better and can totally relate to our clients on an albeit much smaller scale.
If you happen to see anyone in Manila in one of my shirts let them know I said “Hi”.
My store was running on Shopify, which is a great platform if you have regular sales but I decided based on the monthly costs it wasn’t worthwhile for me so I closed it down.
I’m gradually adding those old designs to my Spreadshirt store now and will add more in the future. Please let me know if there is anything missing that you’d like.
Change of direction
I decided to take stock and realised that I’ve been drawing in various forms for many years and realised a more generic website would suit my needs. This is when I also decided to retire my embarrassingly archaic website I setup for my cartoons in the early 2000’s.
Which brings up to the site you are looking at today.
Hopefully this will become a place for me to share my latest creations, talk a little bit about them and maybe you’ll even contact me to draw some for you.
Thanks for reading this far, now go an enjoy the rest of the site.
