Garbage Pile Friends

In case you missed it, Flagrant just launched our swag shop! In honor of this, I’m super excited to give you a little BTS of the creation of some of our items and some insight into how this came about.

Quick overview of the problem: Finding a way to show and sell our designs.

We wanted to make a place to sell Flagrant-flavored items for a while now, but could not find a way to do it that was not labor-intensive for the team. One of our previous attempts was through Gumroad, which would handle the listing and money exchange part of the process, but left members of the team needing to find a place to get the item printed (t-shirts, stickers or pins) through a separate vendor, a place to store the items, and handle all of the packing and shipping once an order came through. This was NOT an effective or sustainable way for us to operate our shop. So, thanks to an internal project called #co-shipit (see more about #co-shipit in the footnote) by Max and me, we were able to find a solution that worked for the whole team: Big Cartel!

Big Cartel is a platform that creates a storefront for you to display items and process payments. On the inventory front, Big Cartel integrates with platforms like Printful and CreativeHub. These sites are where you can upload your designs and create items for sale. The items are printed on demand once a customer makes a purchase and is directly shipped to the customer. This takes all the hassle of storage, shipping, and processing away from the team and allows us to focus on other tasks.

The Swag: Why I made what I made

One of the long-time jokes here at Flagrant amongst the designers is that we are like possums guarding our “trashpile” of designs when someone asks to see what we are working on. Because of this common phrase, I thought it would be fun to make some designs to represent this. I started by sketching out some ideas of how I’d like to make the possum, how I wanted the character to look and feel. I also wanted to make sure that the style was repeatable so that I could create a series of related items/designs.

The inspo:

The sketches:

After I had a solid idea of how I wanted it to look, I started making the poses. The poses I made were based on some of the phrases that float around the Flagrant workspace, like partners in sublime, garbage pile kids and unleashing your spark.

I wanted to make all of these phrases into fun, wearable designs that people would like, even if they didn’t know the meaning behind them. So, the following designs were born under the umbrella of “Garbage Pile Friends”, a series of swag designs:

The Stinker (Like “The Thinker”, but with trash)

Partners in Sublime (Possum and Raccoon friends in a famous anime pose, Dragon Ball Z Fusion Dance)

Unleash Your Spark (a junkyard dog making a break for it)

These designs, as well as a few designs from our vault, have been added to the Flagrant shop! We are so excited to finally see them out in the world <3

See some sneak peeks of some of the items!

Our model Jim is showing off the “Unleash Your Spark” t-shirt in “Grape”.

Footnote: Co-ship it is something we do on a biweekly basis. Two individuals pair together in order to ship ‘a thing’. They present the thing during Friday’s clap & cringe, and all of us will get to marvel at the wonder that is teamwork.

If you’re looking for a team to help you discover the right thing to build and help you build it, get in touch.