Skip to main content

Manic Pop Product Shop!

So lately, I have been having a TON of fun with online custom print clothing shop called Kin Custom. I guess in a way it's a bit like drop ship print sites like Society6 or Zazzle or RedBubble, but I think it appeals to the designer in me since they have a bunch of different styles to customize.

 People have always been hounding me -- "When are you going to release your line/collection(s)?!" for like the past 10 years.

Many of us who have been in or exposed to the industry for real know that starting your own line, manufacturing, and getting that rolling is prohibitively expensive. To make it even worse, most of the time when no one knows who you are, it's much harder to sell product to nearly anyone! And who wants to spend about $10k on your 1st clothing line when no one knows who you are, you are not guaranteed to sell it? What do you do when you create a line no one likes and no one buys?


Well.....enter in Kin Custom! No startup fees. You design the items given to you with your own prints (there are a lot of options!) You set your own margins. You can add these items to your Shopify store, Amazon account, your own website via plugins like WooCommerce and Big Commerce, or Etsy. They do the printing, sewing, packing, shipping. And you get paid for the items you sell!

A pair of shoes I designed. 


I did make sure to see what samples were like before I announced to anyone I had one of these shops. My question is always about quality and how things actually look once printed. 

So here is that shoe in real life...


I am impressed! (And yes, my original drawing had that color variation on it -- so it came out as the file looked!) 

Here are some photos of other real-life orders that went through: 



So yeah, tons of fun. I find myself just sketching random prints/designs and then noting that I could probably make them happen on this site. Like this skirt -- 


I had a drawing on my phone with a similar skirt, and here it is! Ready to order. 

I thought at 1st I would be calm and release "collections" but I figure why not just keep going with all the random cool ideas I have? 

I took a drawing I had for a few years around here, finally colored it and added it to a shirt. 

And then random sketches become an all-over repeating print.

These are men's high tops! 

 This ladies skirt featured on the right was an idea in an old sketchbook of mine from 2013... but now it's a real-life item ready to purchase and wear! 


 The print on here was inspired by Biba, a 1960s fashion designer. 

And another fun waves and stars one. 


Overall, I have WAY more items in the shop, so just click the link here: Manic Pop Kin Custom Shop. 

While I realize this all skews more on graphic design for fashion, I am still beyond excited to have some of my creative pieces out there within the world. Yes, I still do enjoy sewing and designing, but I never, ever wanted to personally be a manufacturer. While I am pretty good at sewing, I didn't want to spend my days holed up at a machine. (That's ok for many, but not for me!) 

This allows me to have time to work on what I want, when I want to, and also make some money on the side from designs! I think it's amazing that we have platforms like this now. When I graduated fashion design school in 2007, even sewing how-to videos on YouTube were not a thing! 

I am currently working on some other things which satisfy the original designs criteria, but I've had a lot of false starts in the past, so I don't want to promise anything. What I can say that it is nearly 100% complete (much further than I got last time!) and the item(s) will be sold via Etsy. 

Unless I get dragged away from this other project for some reason (like having to go back to full time work), I can see the coronavirus keeping us inside for a bit longer. 

But for now, I am grateful for this new awesome platform, and grateful for some time off to work on things I otherwise put by the wayside. 

Hope you all out there are staying safe and enjoying what I have been able to design and put out there! 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Latch Hook Rug Update

A little under a month ago I received all of my supplies to take on one of the biggest long-term projects I have ever taken on - a self-designed latch hook rug. I don't know why, but I am clearly nuts. So beginning today I am posting photos each month, (preferably on the 1st of each month) progress of this gigantic shag rug. See how I started it here (scroll down past posting of my $10 dress).  This is a photo of it today:  Yes, I used the candelabra for scale. Haha.   This rug is really soft and is fun to run your fingers through.  It doesn't look like much was accomplished, but though the number of packages we have gone through of pre-cut latch hook rug yarn already I have calculated that  we've used over 2500 strands for this ie.) 8 packages. I also just ordered 10 more packages of lime green since that's what I ran out of first and 6 more packages of straw yellow. There is still quite a bit to go, but you see the blue row squares? Each of th

DIY Trapeze Dress

I'm a pretty big fan of tent dresses (or trapeze dresses - call it what you want). They're simple, easy-to-make and you can have many variations of them. These are a fun style to wear for spring and summer!  See this DIY from a Good Housekeeping Crafts book from 1971 - photos at the end of my own trapeze top from a while ago! (Bear with me on the photos here - this book is quite cumbersome and hard to scan.)  Applique patterns, in case you wanted the dress to look EXACTLY like the photo. (But why?)  How to cut the fabric efficiently. (This is actually pretty important cost-wise for you - especially with something this big.)  Using pattern instructions from my patternmaking book from college, I created this swingy trapeze top a bit ago. I used sweater fabric from a thrift store find for the collar of this top.   I also opened up the back on the pattern to have a diamond shape.   It can easily be belted like in this photo fo

Shingo Sato and the Art of Transformational Reconstruction

So I got really excited on my break at work today when I got an email from Burda about a webinar they're doing on a pattern technique called "Transformational Reconstruction" developed by Japanese designer Shingo Sato. I hadn't even heard of Shingo Sato until today let alone his design technique but oddly, it's sort of the path I'm going down with my designs anyway as seen with the Sunrise Panel dress as well as the Petra Dress and the pattern making involved in those designs. What I did there is perhaps a "light" version of Sato's where the darts and shaping are hidden in the seam lines. If you've been reading this blog long enough, you know that my design aesthetic focuses largely on color blocking, unusual seam lines, and a love of anything psychedelic. Note: All photos stolen from the internet. Sorry! I'm super-excited. Let me know if it's yours and I'll take it down.  Shingo Sato teaching.  More designs using