I hope you enjoyed learning about myself and Nina in the last couple of blogs.
Now back to the nitty gritty! Business.
So Nina and I are rather sarcastic beings and that is one of the reasons we hit it off so well when we first me. We are not easily offended and take the piss out of ourselves and each other on a regular basis so it’s a good job we are such firm friends. This sense of humour we share really helps when it comes to thinking of slogans that people will see and think, I have GOT to have that in my life. Coming up with and designing our slogans is one of the funnest parts of the business. The slogans tend to come to us when we are doing something else and you can often hear me saying “I’m going to write that down” or “I’m putting that on a t-shirt!” I love how sometimes I give myself way too much credit by thinking that I will actually remember the slogan - I never bloody do so writing them down is so important, I’ve lost too many to the wounded brain cells.
We like our slogans to be humorous, positive and light hearted. We steer clear of anything political because, if I’m really honest I just don’t have it in me to have arguments with strangers on the internet about the offence they may have taken! These days it seems that people can be offended by the slightest thing which is a real shame. Back when I was growing up we were actually able to take the piss out of each other in a humorous and loving way but unfortunately you do get the pricks that take things too far and spoil it for everyone. I hope humour and comedy do not get cancelled by this ridiculous fucking cancel culture. In fact I want to cancel cancel culture so there ya fucktards!
I do love the feminist slogan clothing brands that I’m seeing and they seem to be very popular so good on those brands for doing an awesome job. Our goal with our slogan clothing and accessories brand is making people chuckle with our slogans. Make them relatable. Make them fun and make people smile. I think that is a pretty good goal.
We are often inspired when we are listening to music, especially our old school jams. We then put a Nipa twist on it. Sometimes we start off with a slogan that leads us on to something completely different. Other times one of us will come up with something and we play around with different words until we hit the right button. This can sometimes get a bit feisty when one likes one version and the other likes the other version. I reckon I give in to Nina more but I bet you she will dispute that haha. We go on to design the slogan by looking at waaaaaay too many fonts until the words we are looking at don’t even look like real words. We really wanted to do the slogan 'Boxset Binger" but we just couldn't get past the word 'binger' it just looks so so wrong! Going through the fonts always make me a little sea sick so sometimes I let my inner control freak take a day off and let Nina pick a few that we can look at and come to an agreement together.
It’s funny how I notice fonts now! I pay attention to words, phrases and how things are written. What style? what colour.? Have they used ink, foils or vinyl? You start to notice things that before were just in the background of your thoughts. One of the big things that has got my nose twitching is how the actual fuck do businesses get away with using the Disney font? Or how can they use that quote from Friends and just stick it on a sweatshirt? I find it crazy how many people literally take a saying from a tv show or Disney movie and put it on a t-shirt!! I did not think it was legal and apparently it’s not! People don't really care though if it's making them money in the meantime but I would hate to be looking over my shoulder all the time wandering if we will get caught and loose our business. We could easily go down that road ourselves but I guess we are too pussy, or I like to think of it as we are just plain badass original bitches. There have been a few things that we have come up with that are just a bit to samey to other brands so we just acknowledge how cool it is and then sack it off, whilst crying into our brews!
There have been a few times where we have thought, fuck it shall we do x, y and z but have always had a reality check. We want to stay true to us and our brand of being sarcastic, witty twats and I'm more than happy with that! It might take us a little longer to grow and we might have a few slow months here and there but we are who we are and we are growing each day so that's a damn good start.
It is really difficult to not get pissed off with these types of things. Plenty of people are making loads of sales and living their business dream by simply using already established quotes and flogging them on Facebook. We come up with our own slogans and always google them to make sure they are not already being used. It can be time consuming and, let’s be honest, are brains are not what they used to be especially after 3 lock downs, more booze than a footballers stag do and the inability to string too many sentences together. Despite the fact that a lot of our slogans just come to us we also have creative days when we like to come up with some new ones so we have a nice collection growing.
We have already had a few of our slogans copied and it makes me fucking rage. One business who is well established, has a large social media following and if you believe their socials, are absolutely bossing life, stole 2 of our slogans, the fucking cunt! She also loves to take a quote straight off the tele to the t-shirt and I have no idea how she gets away with it. They say to be flattered when someone copies you but it’s not flattering it’s bollocks, especially when we are still a young business. It’s slightly different with words as a word is a word but a collection of words together to form a slogan is someones work and I think it is really piss poor form to copy it.
Then more recently we have had someone who had the audacity to friend request us on insta whilst nicking our slogans AND the captions we had written underneath the post. Blatantly copying us. When I called her out on it she just deleted my comment from the post! Of course she fucking did! On further investigation we found that she was following loads of our followers and her bio on insta was the same description as ours but she added a word to try and make it different. Just fyi babe it's not different!!!
It's just soooooo annoying!!! We are a little business who are growing our audience and our brand day by day, little by little. Working our little tooshes off in the process. To have people so blatantly copying us and our style is a little soul destroying to say the least. You know what though, Nina and I are so true to ourselves and our personalities and I think that comes across in our socials and our slogans. You may be able to thief our slogans but there is no fucking way you can steal our personalities so bollocks to them haha.
We have come up with a few slogans that have never quite made the cut, they usually contain swear words! Now our kids can read we can’t really walk around with fuck, piss or cunt blazoned across our chests, as much as would absolutely LOVE TO!! We have to be extra creative. For example we have Peace Taker rather than piss taker and I’ll Be Seeing You Next Tuesday rather than cunt and of course Mother Funkster instead of, you guessed it, Mother Fucker!!
There are also a few that we have launched that are just not popular and it always makes me realise you have to be thinking about your audience when you put designs out there. I mention this because some of the slogans I thought would be popular have flopped and others that I may not have been so keen on have done brilliantly. It is all about that ideal client who I will talk about in my next blog.
Also one of the reasons we decided to offer the option to choose your own colour combinations is because Nina and I's tastes are totally different. Nina is quite understated and likes the greys, black and whites whilst I am a bit more in your face and love colour. We decided that it would be awesome if we could give the control back to you, our customers. We absolutely love seeing your choices too. Some combinations I am not sure about and then we print them and it's like wow they look shit hot! Plus it means that whatever you choose is bespoke to you and all we are providing is the slogan the rest is up to you.
If you haven't already, head over to the website now to check out all the possible colour combinations, you will not be disappointed.