Making some more progress on the clothing brand. Have the next 3 shirt designs mapped out already. The plan for the first shirt is to make a chess board with all the characters from the lore.
Whats not explained in the lore is that all the humans (Ionians) in Ione city. Are skeletons or blow up dolls. All the males are skeletons and all the women are blow up dolls. Yet for some reason they keep procreating and increasing the population of Body Island. That damn phosphorus in the squid is very beneficial to the reproductive organs.
The characters that I am planning to incorporate into the chess board right now are:
King= Cereal (main skeleton hacker dude), Queen= Memory (blow up doll), Bishop=Proxy the parrot Knight=Echo the cat
Of course the squids are gonna have characters and pieces of their own.
King= Scarred Squid (Plague), Queen= Memories twin sister (Freak), Knight= Skeleton Sea horse (Dagger), Bishop= Mutated coral being (Hex)
Of course the main characters are Cereal and Memory. So they will be the ones on the banner. Soon I will write the lore for a day in the life of Cereal which will explain many of the things he does in his every day life. Since he sends Proxy back to the 80s a lot he is obsessed with stuff from the 80s. Like arcade machines, comic books, power glove and floppy disk. So these are the main iconography you will see surrounding Cereal.
Freak was taken from the surface and being held hostage by the squid king. Can't think of any names to give the squids besides the squid king Plague. Only the one Ionian who was stolen and dragged to the bottom of the sea.
I'm still working on figuring out the perfect pocket logo. But the other accent I will be using on clothing is this glitch pixel aesthetic. And I have figured out the perfect slogan to use on the hang tags. (not the 8 Bits of string) That slogan is for the site and some accents on clothing. This other slogan will not be used for clothing. Well at least not in the foreseeable future.
I have many more plans for Anti.biz. There is a lot more art I want to create to decorate the lore with. And other pages. I plan to add a comic book image to the terms of service page to make it less boring looking. (also running out of places to put all my pixel art) Eventually there will be pixel art all over the place. I plan to commission Phone wall papers, maybe even create Anti.biz Windows/Mac icon packs. I also like the idea of these LED Pixel displays where you can add pixel art to them.
If I ever buy one of those and really like it I may start selling Anti.biz Pixel Art packs for those 64x64 led matrix 4096 pixel displays. They look really cool!
But for now the focus is on finishing all the clothing aesthetic/logos, main website graphics, and the chess shirt. Once all the pieces are done and in place. I will figure out the best local manufacture near me (after I get all my clothing tag, logos made) I know the shirts I am going to use most likely will be Comfort Color blanks. I was looking for shirts that mimic the Ralph Lauren Polo look and with similar measurements. And they seem to fit the bill quite nicely. I still need to test the shirt to make sure I absolutely love it before I buy 100 of them.
Those shirts are about $6 each, so 100 x $6= $600 then you tack on cost like sewing the clothing tag, pocket logo, and glitch aesthetic + a screen print. That number is easily going to jump upwards $15-$20. So I could be looking at $2000 cost to sell a run of 100 shirts for our initial launch. Couple that in with some business cards/inserts/hang tags/free stickers/marketing campaign/photography models I am probably looking at another $1000 to do all that. Not to mention all the additional art work I need is going to cost me upwards of $600.
Working on your own clothing brand business is definitely not something cheap if you want to gain some fans and following which I have just a couple now of friends and family that are aware of what I been working on the past couple years.
If I sell all the shirts for 2.1x to 2.4x the total manufacturing cost im guesstimating the final retail cost will be $42-$48. Which sounds like a lot. But I have purchased plenty of expensive ass shirts that only had a print on them. And a print is only like $5 or so. Like I own this Le Fix shirt that cost me $70. Super over priced and not worth it. All my clothes will have little extra aesthetic accents added to them to make them stand out from your run of the mill t-shirt. Not to mention an entire video game background/lore to get people interested in the characters and brand more.
I would like to create clothes in the future featuring the various characters. I have plans for very complex high fashion pieces that will incorporate many different elements in subtle ways. The only way I can make it happen is by people to continue to buy the clothes so I can keep creating new and interesting stuff. I can promise anyone reading this that you will see some very original and creative ideas coming from Anti.biz. So please sign up for our newsletter, follow our socials and stay tuned. Cas its a work in progress and things move slowly when funds are low and you have to wait on people.
Update 6/12/2020 most of these ideas have been scratched. My friend Eliza gave me good advice on the direction of the lore kind of being faceless, genderless and not sexist with the blowup dolls. So we wont know the gender or race of Cereal the hacker and there will be no love interest as of yet or the foreseeable future.