As many other things in my career, it started with a silly idea.

I have been prefacing many talks throughout the years with a slide featuring the tongue-in-cheek gradient background, a clipart cat and the words 'Graphic Design is my Passion' unapologetically written in comic sans. For the uninitiated it's a weird meme. For designers though, it's a fun and ironic quip at the craft of design. I like it. Everything from the rainbow gradient to the smirking cat— and so a few weeks ago I decided to turn it into sticker for my laptop. Redrew the clipart cat and everything. The sticker, however turned out way nicer than I had dared hope for and several people immediately asked if they could buy one. A few clicks on gumroad later, they could.

Now that I had suddenly sold a few stickers I had to find a good way to ship them. I purchased envelopes and holo foilbags and used the last profits to purchase a label printer. I love it and I now want to sell more things just for an excuse to use it.

More orders kept coming in as I was learning all about the wonders of snail mailing letters around the world. Shipping even something this small is ridiculously expensive and, at this scale, a lot of manual labor. After a night of refining my custom label on the label machine and experimenting with porto on envelopes the first batch of stickers have gone out.

Mailing untracked letters around the world (one customer is from New Zealand!) is going to be slow and I'm anxious to hear if all of the little letters will find their way from Denmark to their many destinations. Please do drop me a line when it arrives, but make sure to give it amble time to do so (I'm guessing that two weeks for overseas delivery is probably expected).

The initial batch of stickers have almost all but sold out and I'm kinda excited to do more. With these margins and the time consuming shipping it'll never be "good business", but so far I have really enjoyed the bespoke nature of making something deliberate and limited and shipping it to someone else. There's an arts'n'crafts quality to it that's often missing from the lives of digital designers. It feels like a very down-to-earth creative outlet for me that I can do when time permits.

I just put the store on a custom domain at flarup.shop and have designed and ordered 3 new sticker designs (!). I'll drop a line when new stuff is available in the shop. I guess I'm running a tiny shop now. Welcome.

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