L33FLOG #1—A Year After BLOOM
HEY! HELLO! YO, and welcome to my very first blog post! The “L33FLOG” if you will. I’ve been considering starting a shop blog for a while now, and there’s no time like the present to get things going. I won’t lie, I can’t deny that I’m a little nervous (yet excited) about it seeing as I have no idea how much to share with you all. If anything, lets kick things off with something a little more exciting~
If you read the title of this post ( fingers crossed that you did 🤞🏾), you’d know that it’s officially been one year since I dropped The BLOOM Collection in my shop. It was such a stressful, fun, and challenging rollercoaster of an experience to say the least. With it being the anniversary of the collection, I thought it would be nice to give you all the bts deets on my process designing the collection and how I feel about it now.
My creative process really isn’t anything new or revolutionary, but what it is, is wholly spontaneous and usually begins with a single word or phrase to use as the theme. In this case, the word was bloom. At this point in time it was early spring in March (my birthday actually) when I landed on the VERY original idea of having a floral theme for the spring collection. I know what you’re thinking,
but as a lover of flowers and plants in general, how could I not?! Wouldn’t have partially based my brand on them otherwise.
I knew I wanted the collection to be expansive and offer a variety of products both new and old to the shop. In terms of new~ I went to Instagram and asked y’all what types of new products you’d like to see in the shop, and one of the entrees was jewelry. I thought it was a great idea and one that I figured wouldn’t be too hard to execute with my current manufacturer.
I knew going into the design phase that a loosely cherry blossom based, five-petaled flower would be the base of my collection so turning it into a wearable pendant was a no-brainer. And that’s how the BLOSSOM PENDANT was born! Came out l super cute if I do say so myself.
The next item(s) added to the shop was the BLOOM PRINT SET. I wanted to create two distinct prints with separate vibes—one bold and a little more simplistic, and the other softer with a little bit of texture.
I actually incorporated a few new techniques, like 3D elements for the print on the left. It added a bit of depth and made the whole flower stand out against the background.
3D elements were actually for the six-piece BLOOM WALLPAPER set. Doing phone wallpapers wasn’t something new to MAGICALL33F actually. Some may remember, but I used to offer them as part of the rewards went I had my Patreon going. For the collection I didn’t wanna offer just a single design, so you got six options to choose from! You’re welcome~
To be perfectly honest, I’ve actually been using the big flower wallpaper on my own phone ever since I designed it. I love it that much 🤭.
Next up is one of my favorite sticker designs thus far (and that’s saying a lot). Surprisingly, even with all the stickers I’ve done, I’ve never done one with a colored background. Let me know if you agree, but it completely changes the feel of the design! Really enjoyed how quickly this one came together though—simple, colorful, & slightly illustrative 👌🏾. BLOOM STICKER you are my favorite!
Definitely gotta add more stickers designs like this in future collections.
FINALLY we’ve come to the final piece of the collection, the BLOOM ‘N’ SPROUT TEE. Speaking of tea, let’s spill. You know how I mentioned the stress and challenges of this collection? Yeah, well, this shirt was the culprit for sure 😅. The design came to me at my day job one morning and I had to scribble it down. Initially it was supposed to be a 5 colored print, but you anything about screen printing—the higher the number of colors, the greater the cost. So right at the beginning I had to pivot slightly from the original concept.
The next loop on this rollercoaster was production time. Since this was my first big launch after my brand refresh, I wanted to “go all out” and add a hem tag to the design. Even though I thought it would be a cute little detail on the shirt, it did add two extra weeks to the already delayed production.
Here comes the big drop 🎢!!! I was so excited to just into the box when the shirts finally arrived, but ✦plot twist✦ the colors were all wrong 🫥. Talk about a bummer. What was supposed to lime, wound up being closer to a kelly green than again. Definitely not the vision I had in mind, but I did what any other smaller business owner would do: drop the price and sell ‘em anyway! This was the big ticket item of the collection ya’know?
So how do I feel about The BLOOM Collection a whole year later? Even with the drama (that I didn’t even fully go into) surrounding the shirt I’m still extremely happy with what I put out there! A lot of work on the frontend, and backend went into making this collection happen, and that, I could never be mad at.
Some final FINAL takeaways:
Never be ashamed to pivot if something doesn’t quite work out like you planned.
Work with manufacturers that are willing to provide information that will only help your project be the best it can be.
Oof, ok, let’s wrap this up ‘cause I’ve been yapping for a while. I hope y’all have a good time reading this and that it shed a little insight. I hope you’re all doing well, being safe, and staying hydrated. Until the next L33FLOG!
Stay magical~