Highs & Lows of September

Howdy all!

Oof, September has been a month!! First off, please forgive me for not posting at least one or two updates. We’ve been really productive and have had a lot to share, but so productive that I hadn’t even really had the time to make a decent post about it all, so buckle up cause I’ve got a lot to share.

One reason we’ve been less active on updates and social media has, unfortunately, been due to us getting Covid earlier this month. Thankfully, I only had to cancel attending one of the events we had scheduled, but for us, Covid was a lot worse for us than I feel most people I know who’ve experienced it make it out to be. 😤 On one hand, I’m not sure if we had a worse case, or if perhaps, being in America, people like to downplay it so they can get back to business as usual. While we’ve been testing negative for a little over 2 weeks now, I suspect we actually may have long Covid as Taka still has an occasional light cough and sniffles, and I’ve had asthmatic symptoms (despite not having asthma). During the core of being positive with Covid, Taka seemed worse off, but his recovery has seemed more chill than mine. My exhaustion took a while to wear off and now I don’t know if I’m still experiencing exhaustion or if I’m just tired constantly because my sleep schedule got all messed up. 🤷🏻‍♀️ Maybe a little of column A and Column B.

In any case, because I treasured the limited hours I actually had energy, I was hyper focused on our designs while my health improved this month. You may have seen my small sneak peeks of the colored version of the sketches of the SLR Princesses on IG stories that I started in July. I’m really happy with how they turned out and really proud to have some new designs that are completely mine from start to finish. I don’t know if I’ve really ever openly said it, but one of my insecurities with our brand is how most of what we product isn’t my own art, but Taka’s work. And while I’m so thrilled to be creating it all together, it makes me sometimes feel like an imposter artist because only a handful of things are completely my designs (Kokeshi, 2020 Sticker Sheets and prints, Miren, pretty winkers trading cards, freebie stickers, freebie washi, collab pins, Inu hariko, and eyeball, pumpkin and kitty dango). Besides that, almost everything is Taka’s designs, which I will still take some credit because if I had to assign myself a role at Shishido Creative, besides owner, production artist, fulfillment, customer service, social media and website manager, quality checking, and whatever other hats I’m wearing, I’d probably receive the title of Creative Director, since the majority of designs/themes/decisions are my ideas. As you all know, it falls on me to do the other tasks which is why Taka takes on most of the sketching and artwork itself since he’s less skilled at um, all those tasks. Please don’t take that as a jab at Taka, he knows it just as well. 😂 Both roles of course are so important, so I hope it doesn’t sound like I’m complaining, just that I often feel like the last role I get to play is artist. So I hope you all really enjoy the SLR Princesses. I’m planning to release one per month, exclusively to the pin club. I’m wrapping up vectors for the pin club and plan to vector out Ami first.

Speaking of me living in vector land, I’ve spent a lot of time this past week and half or so vectoring some new and exciting designs. As you all know, we’ve been trying to focus on our original characters and designs, as well as push our original designs into the wholesale world more. One of our target wholesale markets has been museums and we had an order from the local Asian museum, Wing Luke Museum in August. We were invited to do a pop up at the museum on October 30th, and since it’s right before Halloween, I decided having a limited theme of Yokai would be best. Because of the theme, we thought it would be the perfect time to work on some new releases as well, so we have been working on a few new products including some eco bags featuring our original character, Kyuu-chan, and Taka’s cute Kamaitachi, slicing through the bag on one side and working as a sushi chef on the other side. We also updated our original mascot tissue paper pattern featuring Shishi-Maru and Shishi-ko to be used for eco bags. My thought is to also give the branded eco bag for free to orders over $100 at in-person events. I wasn’t initially planning to presale these ecobags as I already put them into production, but if anyone is interested in them, I’ve decided to open presales for pin club members only. We are also working on Yokai and matsuri themed washi tape designs and I’m hoping to get some keychains into production soon. So as you can see, it’s been a very productive and creative month despite getting sick.

Oh, and final note on how productive this month has been, I’m also working on a collaboration with a local friend and jewelry maker, Dainty District. More details as we iron everything out, but we met up yesterday to flesh out ideas and sketches. ♥️

OCTOBER DESIGNS
I’ve finished the linework for October’s Mugen flower, kiku, or Chrysanthemum. It is likely we will add a second design as an extra add-on, but first I need to finish vectoring SLR S Fighter and JDTE (which Taka is wrapping up this afternoon).

PRODUCTION UPDATES
I want to be transparent, I did get some of the latest pins in when we were ill, and didn’t even bother to touch them for about a week other than to check what we got since I didn’t want to contaminate our products. As we have been focused on getting better and working on the new designs, I have only managed to unbag the latest designs and not yet gotten around to grading. After I wrap up the vectors this weekend I’ll be focusing on grading pins and getting them out the door. The designs I have in right now are:

• Guardian of Revolutions
• Time Keeper restock (including manga variant)
• Smug Scoundrel
• Shadow Queen Restock
• 2 of the 4 lotus variants
• 3 of the 4 Morning Glory variants
• Konpeito Earrings
• Some surprise earrings
• Pink Bunny Toire restocks
• Some surprise OC pins
• Hands of the Sorcerer Restock
• Rose Petal fillers
• Feather filler restocks
• Momiji restocks

I was supposed to get all the morning glory, lotus variants and Moonlight Defender in the last shipment, but my manu got wrong about what was packed up after all. They’re all done, but somehow they only sent 2 of the 3 boxes and he said he’ll send out the rest next time. Unfortunately, China goes on holiday for a week so I won’t be getting any new pins in for at least another two weeks, but hopefully that means August designs will join Sailor Moon and the remaining floral variants.

Ok, that was a lot to share, so thank you if you made it all the way here! Looking forward to sharing the finalized designs for October, as well as Princess Mrcry and more original designs! Talk atcha soon!

Mandy & Taka