Sharing our vicTORII

It’s exactly one year ago that I decided to test the e-commerce waters, because I felt I couldn’t get the best out of myself at my office job. While COVID-19 and the subsequent consequences of it are awful, it gave me the time and space to tryout new things, such as playing around in Shopify and creating my first store. Few months later, I fully jumped into the deep end of the pool by quitting my job to fully focus on my new ambitions, which, I was told was a very stupid idea considering we were in the middle of a pandemic and possibly facing the worst economic crisis in a long time.

The rollercoaster that followed, made me occasionally feel like I should have listened to those people and should have appreciated a stable income. The subsequent months entailed one or two monthly breakdowns which followed by a strong determination to prove people wrong. It became all or nothing - I put everything on the line and ran a loss month after month, and kept on trying, redefining, and reiterating until finally the vision, the idea and the products clicked. I think that’s the most difficult part of starting a company; defining who you are as a company, what you stand for and what your unique contribution or added value is (in terms of a product or service).

Once you have that vision - you know what you’re working towards and things get a lot easier from that point on. There’s a huge difference when working with graphic artists now in comparison to the start. I remember that I asked the first (Japanese)graphic artist that I worked with that I wanted something Japanese, Futuristic and Minimalistic without having any clue what that was supposed to look like. He seemed a bit baffled, but decided to have a stab at it, and somehow managed to create something really cool which became my very first design below

NAOKI

For those who are interested, the three kanji at the top read as: "Dan Sya Ri" and roughly means "getting rid of the clutter in your life and living with the bare minimum of things". The abstract styled katakana reads "minimalist" in a Cyberpunky manner. It’s fun to see the above design and compare it to our newest designs where I actually knew what I wanted the outcome to be. Our newest Tiger and Samurai designs were my ideas, but a customer came up with the TORII idea (thanks Ulrike!). So if you have any ideas on anything you’d like to wear, please feel free to share them 😊 Below are our newest designs:

TORA

5AMUR41

TORII

I hope you are as hyped on our new designs as I am! That’s it for now folks! I want to thank you for being part of the NEOMACHI journey <3