Hi Folks,
First let me say how impressed I am with the Zazzle community in general. It has certainly been an encouragement and an inspiration to me during the long days spent in the development of our new store:
http://www.zazzle.com/GalleryGiftsThis is my first ever day in posting about our Zazzle store project. Like so many others, I sort of shut myself in a wired cave for a full six months, building up the store in a seemingly endless stream of days and nights.
Of course a lot of time was spent developing original artwork to apply to products, and converting art from past projects so it would work in this context. I was a book cover illustrator for a hand full of big-boy publishers for a number of years, as well as a technical illustrator, etc. and I headed our small agency for decades, that is until I got totally burned out on the constant stream of critical deadlines and with running all over town doing press checks, yada, yada, yada, that is, until my wife and I made the decision to go into the hosting business, which has been good, but hey, it aint art!
So after my six year break from doing anything artwise short of some banners here and there, suddenly out of the blue I tooled up started doing art work again, sort of a deep-soul-urge kind of thing. That was about a year ago. But how in the heck does one make a living at art, without (me) getting back into endless gut-turning contact work????
Then last fall I took another look at the whole POD thing, and it was game-on.
So now I am sitting here all bug-eyed and pooped after putting tons of time into our new Zazzle store, hoping the whole thing will eventually fly once we fire up the social networking, etc. And yes, doing my first day of, “Hey take a look at this!!!” forum posts.
Our store (I say “our” because my wife has provided loads of support, some nifty product design, and endless patience all along the way with me personally) is not exactly a typical sort of Zazzle store. I started with three concepts: Classic, Vintage, and Modern in terms of art/product focuses, but I did not want to open a whole slew of Zazzle stores like so many other folks do. I wanted to get everything under one roof. In doing so, I realized right off the bat that there was need for a kind of a navigation system overlay. Luckily, I found just enough leeway in terms of the scripting that Zazzle allowed, for me to pull this one off and to have a little fun with the whole thing along the way.
So hey folks, I would very much appreciate it if you took-a-look, and let me know what your impressions are, good, bad, or ugly, just whatever you think. I’m just hungry for feedback at this point.
And yeah, please feel free to pickup any products from our store to display/sell in your own stores, I realize my art is not everyone’s cup-o-tea. I’ve already seen my stuff around in some other Zazzle stores, and this just sort of gives me a thrill. Most of my original stuff is in the Modern and Steampunk sections, some in Vintage too, but all products were more or less designed by us in house, in other words, there's no products from other stores here.
http://www.zazzle.com/GalleryGiftsThanks much!