We used to have a store. Actually, it was just me, pumping out shirts and stickers from my garage. However, I found that over time, I wasn’t particularly happy with the quality of the shirts. The vinyl would crack over time, and I wasn’t the fastest person in the world to get an order out the door. I shut down the store because I didn’t want to too poorly in the name of hackaday. I’ve had TONS of emails asking me to turn it back on.
Today, we’re turning on another store. It isn’t fancy. It isn’t amazing. It should, however, provide higher quality products than we had before, and more different products to choose from. I’ve put shirts, coffee mugs, and stickers in so far. The graphics were all done correctly for each format, so they should turn out very nice.When you buy Hackaday merchandise, you help ensure Hackaday will stick around as long as possible.
Now, lets talk a little bit about where we should go from here.
1. Merchandise
Yes, we know we could go get shirts screen printed. I would rather have custom Merchandise made for us that we could inspect and keep in stock. That is a “one day” kind of thing that we will have to work towards. Right now we have virtually no budget for this and I don’t trust us to provide the customer service a retail store demands. We’re too busy looking for cool stuff to write!
2. Tools/components
Someone always mentions that we should sell tools. I don’t have a problem with it, but it doesn’t make sense to me either. You all know that we don’t make tools. The tools you would buy from us would just be other people’s tools that we bought first. We think the people we know who sell tools probably do a better job with customer service and order fulfillment than we would. Maybe someone has an angle on this I haven’t thought of.
3.Kits
We’ve discussed this and every time, we get excited. We would love to come up with some kits to sell. We have a few ideas floating around but have to work out some things first. This will most likely be our next step. We would be interested in hearing your ideas and input on this one. Obviously, these would be on the simpler side. If any of our writers put in the amount of time and effort necessary for a huge project, they’d probably branch out on their own.
So that’s it for now. Go buy a shirt and a coffee mug. We appreciate it. Oh, and post pics of your stuff in our forums or on the Hackaday flickr pool… or on every wall of every building of your town square.
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