Well, it’s been a minute, hasn’t it? Judging from the look of zeroboutique.com this last year, I wouldn’t blame many of you for thinking that maybe I had died, gone to jail, or left the country. Broken images, blog posts so old they already had kids in college, wonky CSS and a Flash gallery that seemed to work approximately half the time (on a good day). Oh, and it was an online shirt store with one important distinction: for the last year or so, there was no way to purchase the shirts. Straight outta 1998, Holmes.
So what happened, man? Did I lose my marbles and just give up? Find that raising meerkats in Arizona was much more rewarding and profitable? Get married to my high school sweetheart who convinced me to give up on all this screen printing nonsense and go sell insurance for her father? Hell no. In fact, I didn’t stop once. So why so quiet on the online front then, you may wonder? Well, it’s kind of complicated.
Essentially, these last 2 & 1/2 years or so have been dedicated to a lot of research and development into new techniques, acquiring new equipment and inks in order to implement many of these techniques, and then of course putting those techniques and equipment to use. And it’s been a ssssllllooowwww process. You saw the beginnings of that process on the old site. Those shirts were the first ugly evolutionary leap out of the water for us: out of just being another screen printing shop printing our weird designs on generic t-shirts, into being an actual clothing company that manufactures original pieces. That process is still very new and awkward and ongoing, but it’s only been recently that the stuff has achieved the unique level where I felt it needed a new home. Zeroboutique.com was essentially dead to me- it had a really good 10 year run, but the site was in a way kind of a reminder of past glories. I had started to lose interest in just being another t-shirt company around 2007, and sales had consequently slowed over the years until they finally stopped completely.
So I was tired of looking back. I decided the line had a new feel, so it needed a new logo and a new web site. Once I found out zbqfanclub.com was available, it was a no-brainer: ZBQ Fan Club was our first Facebook group and was pretty popular before Facebook forced us to create a new one due to some structural changes (for our current Facebook page go here). And so I sat down to create the new site, thinking I’d have it wrapped up in a month. As so often happens with these types of things, it took a lot longer to finish than anticipated. But finish it I did. And here it is.
And what’s next? Well, more shirts of course. New prints, new artists, and a lot of new stuff (and some old stuff too) from artists we’ve been working with for years. But also prints, stickers, bags, things you can wear that aren’t shirts at all, original art, “t-shirt canvasses”, and much more that I haven’t even thought of yet. I always said I’d keep doing this as long as I still enjoyed it. Well, it’s been nearly 20 years now, and I feel like I’m just getting warmed up here. The best is most definitely yet to come.
