Greetings from smoky New Jersey. I ventured outdoors this morning to water some plants and it smelled like one big giant campfire. So, I think we’ll be staying inside for the remainder of the day.
This week’s post was inspired by a Creativity and Contentment reader. While perusing my art website last week, Sarah noticed that one of the shops where items featuring my artwork can be purchased is Hot Topic and she wrote wondering if I would share with readers how I managed to get my stuff into Hot Topic. So, Sarah, this is for you!
Now first off, I feel it’s my duty to issue a couple of disclaimers. While it’s true that graphic tees like this one:
featuring my artwork are available from Hot Topic, I have only ever had two of my designs sold by this emporium. While Hot Topic does have physical stores across the country, I’m not sure if any of my t-shirts were every sold in store or if they were only available from HotTopic.com. Secondly, sorry to burst any bubbles here, but if anyone was thinking that getting their artwork sold on tees by Hot Topic was the key to fabulous riches, well, that certainly hasn’t been my experience. I have earned only a very small amount of money from this brand partnership.
For anyone who is scratching their head and wondering what Hot Topic is, they are a store that from my recollection became something of a shopping mall staple in the mid to late nineties. Their target market seems to be teens and young adults. In the early days, counterculture was their bread and butter with a big emphasis on goths and punks. These days this has explanded with a lot of branded fan gear especially Disney, Sanrio, assorted superhero franchises and anime. They also go in for whatever “aesthetics” (as the kids call them) are hot on social media such as cottagecore or the Y2K aesthetic, and if all this is a bit over your head, well then like me you are probably a bit older than Hot Topic’s target demographic.
In my younger, cooler years I was a Hot Topic customer, proof of which is this vintage photo of yours truly in her midnight blue pleather pants that came from Hot Topic:
So, how did I come to sell my stuff at a store that’s so popular with the youths? Well, it all comes down to my love of a challenge. Sometimes, when it comes to creativity a prompt helps inspire me. That’s one reason I love design challenges. Spoonflower holds weekly surface pattern design challenges, which I love entering. Another site that holds regular design challenges is Threadless. These are almost always graphic t-shirt design challenges since that is what Threadless mainly sells. Threadless has different ongoing challenges as well as different limited themed challenges. Prize money is up for grabs, but there are also other perks of entering these challenges.
I’ve never won a Threadless challenge (though I did win a brand new iPad Pro from them in a giveaway they had last year, so thank you again, Threadless!) but to date the two t-shirt designs that I’ve had sold by Hot Topic came about through entering Threadless challenges. The first, my Candy for Brains t-shirt design was entered into a Halloween themed Threadless challenge and later picked by Hot Topic to be sold as part of their Threadless wholesale line.
The second my Chippy chipmunk design was entered into the Threadless x Hot Topic Kawaii challenge and selected by Hot Topic for their Threadless Wholesale line. Cool beans, as we used to say back in my younger, cooler years.
I’ll be the first to admit that my love of entering design challenges has not made me rich, but challenge prompts have given me lots of artistic inspiration over the years, and they’re fun. So. I’ll continue to enter these challenges because I enjoy them, and because sometimes it’s good to challenge ourselves.
Well, it looks like I’m going to have to get up and turn on the lights here in my office because even though it’s the middle of the day this Canadian wildfire smoke is making things a bit dark and dreary in here. Here’s hoping for brighter, clearer days ahead!
— Alissa
Weekly Inspiration
What I’m Reading: Face by Joma West
What I’m Watching: This hilarious thespian flying squirrel
What I’m Listening to: “Never Let You Go” by Third Eye Blind (that Sonic commercial is making it feel like the 1990s again, might be time to break out my old pleather pants!)
Find out more about my books at alissagrosso.com
Find out more about my digital art at alissacarin.com
My apologies for the typos and such this post is almost certainly riddled with.
Creativity and Contentment 