My biggest failure
a Magic shop that wasn't meant to be.
Someone is at the door.
Failure, an old friend,
you know it, it lives in you too.
Let’s pickup right after the end of this post here.
This is a little story about course correcting, pivoting and setting expectations. What I set out to do and the path I’m on today are still the same, I just didn’t know it at the start.
So this comes right after having the idea to open a brick and mortar shop. Let me set the scene for exactly what kind of shop it would be.
The Magic Shop
You’re walking down the old streets of Poole, amongst coffee shops, fashion boutiques and phone repair stores, there’s a lantern standing proud of the shop facades with the sign “The Magic Lantern - Fiction Store”. Two large display windows, a wooden door wide open and a sign that says - “trespassers will be zapped”. You’re feeling brave that day, you’re heading in.
From the ceiling there are large paper-mâché creatures hanging and ropes with laundry strewn about, as well as flasks and other dangling magic potion making paraphernalia.
On the walls to your left and right are displays made of wood and glass, full of good quality toys, figurines and collectables. Next to them there’s a swivelling rack with high fidelity posters. At the centre of the room there’s a themed diorama displaying a scene from a topical intellectual property.
There’s no tchotchkes, poor quality mugs and keychains, or 10 cent replicas sold at a crazy markup like what you see in most every shop.
As you walk further into the venue there’s about a dozen tables, as well as a few sofas, all mismatched. You’re surrounded by brick walls, each with little displays and curiosities, maybe even some easter eggs from the stories. Things like Mago’s height carved onto one of the door frames or a handprint in multi coloured paint.
There’s a bookshelf with comic books you can read in the shop, and a shelf with work from the local artists. A bulletin board for any local events and people who want to advertise their work is on the wall on the left.
I’m standing behind the counter. Since I was little I used to tell my mom I wanted to be a merchant, maybe at the time I meant a little grocery store like my local one. But at the Magic Lantern, I’d be behind the counter making coffees and serving themed baked goods and sandwiches.
There’s a tablet where you can see other stock we don’t have on display, but it’s all stored in the premises so it’s in your hands in no time. There’s a door to the right, a very spacious room with large tables, these are work surfaces for the crafts shop.
Here is where we make the themed displays for the shop, you can walk in and talk to the master craftsman. Bring one of your projects! Take a space for the day! You can use our tools and purchase some of the materials or paints we may have in stock.
Out the back there’s a kitchen preparing some of the confectionary we sell, as well a meals for the staff and food from a simplified menu for the patrons.
Between the kitchen and the service counter there’s a set of stairs going up to the offices, we’ve got our accounts department here. Another office for the sales and marketing, and then, a big room! With drafting tables and big windows with natural light bathing the room. Keep it quiet, our artists are at work here. Outside of normal working ours we do classes, workshops, live modelling, and listen to guest speakers! Every once in a while we bring an animal to draw too.
And most important of all, it’s full of passionate people, who make and create, and teach and share, friends and family, growing up and growing old together.
How to become a merchant
I don’t want to put myself in a position where I’m pretending that I’ve grown in poverty, but I’d like to share that, as I put my home together as an adult, I realized that I grew up with being a lot poorer than It felt like at the time, mainly in amenities and opportunities.
My wife and I have done an amazing job for the last 10 years to have a decent quality of life, and I’m proud to say that it was from our joint efforts.
What has this got to do with the shop? Well, when you’re building something it usually starts from what others can teach or help you with, so when I was approaching this idea of a shop I couldn’t rely on the experience and help of my family or peers because they hadn’t done anything like it.
And so, I tried to take small, prudent steps into venturing out on my own.
There’s honestly a lot of financial options, from loans, grants, funding, investment, self funding, but all of them require the same thing, a solid business plan.
I’ve now got a goal and a clear path. I realized I didn’t have enough information to formulate a business plan yet, so I set out to get some experience, establish a brand and a small selection of products. This would a allow me to learn about suppliers, manufacturing, sales, importing, etc… all important facets of the long term goal.
But I couldn’t shake the feeling that it was just leading me to learn all these skills that maybe I wasn’t very motivated to master.
Branding
Let’s start with something tangible that I can start with, the logo.
Because I had decided on the name and type of business, I knew the general design I wanted. I was never fully happy with any of these but here are the original attempts:
With that done it was time for a product! Something I could dip my toes into and learn about development and manufacturing. I had learned how to use use Adobe Illustrator to make the logos and I had been musing about Mago’s story, so I thought to do a colouring book, it seemed fitting.
It’s within scope, cheap to produce, easy to store and overall, a great starting point.
I learned about stock, how to buy an ISBN and got quotes from DPD, Royal Mail and Hermes for distribution. I even registered with Amazon KDP to try self publishing and Amazon printing.
Colouring Book
So, on we went to make a book.
My drawing skills where very basic at the time, so even though I love them because -nostalgia - it was a struggle to make them, drawing was difficult and stressful and didn’t come easy to me back then.
Next stage was getting these printed and Amazon’s print on demand was a no-go! The quality just wasn’t there for colouring pages, so I found a local printer called Palm Print & Design who made a thousand copies for me, I couldn’t spring for the best paper but they did great within my budget.
The downfalls of this as a starting product were immediately obvious. It had a low page count compared to other books, it was centred around an unknown IP, the price point of a single book was lower than the shipping cost. All this made it difficult to sell as a first product.
Vast majority of these are still sitting in my loft in 2024. I’m still unsure what to do with them. I’ve had it in the back of my head that I’ll slowly gift them to the local children’s hospice and other children’s institutions, but in case they’d like to see more I want to have accurate information on the back of the book because it’s so out of date by now. Maybe also find a way to gift them some of the stories when these are finished too.
I’ve been nervous to act on that, I don’t know why yet. I feel like I should give them my best work, not the leftovers I couldn’t sell.
T-shirts
We’d been working on t-shirt printing for a minute too at this point, and since I had experience working in a t-shirt printing shop for a summer, I was familiar with the process and the different types of printing.
First, I tried a local business, really wasn’t happy with the quality and service, very poor experience.
Then, I tried a Print-on-Demand service, I think Redbubble.com. They use either DTG or sublimation printing, which was actually better than the last but still below average quality.
Finally, I found a local business who did screen printing and it is by far the best. I’ve now been using these clothes for nearly 5 years and they are as good now as the day I got them. Limited colour palette and a slightly more expensive, but worth it in longevity. I’ve got it done at Heatwave Print, but it seems they have move operations to St Leonards-on-sea.
All the time spent looking for the right quality and fit was very draining and there is a lot of upfront investment. Again, I am very proud of what I’ve accomplished, but some of the downsides became very obvious once again.
Stock mostly. Where other print services can offer a large variety of colours and sizes since they print everything on demand, I had to have a single colour and limited size options to keep it all within budget, and if you don’t sell enough volume you need to pay for a new screen to be made each time. And so, clothing becomes hard to produce in limited quantities.
Well, onto the next one.
Website
Man, I was dreading this one, honestly. I have a background in IT where I built some websites for class, which is exactly why I didn’t look forward to it.
I’d done this in school but had never published one myself. I started buying a domain from Godaddy.com, but once I had to start investing into Internet Certificates I binned that off real quick.
Shopify seemed a better fit, they offered integration with several print on demand services, so I could supplement my products with some Posters or Mugs from other suppliers without having to stock them. They also had a big selection of Drop shippers which seemed alluring at the start but you very quickly realize it’s mostly garbage, binned that one too.
If you’re not stocking most products yourself the delivery times vary wildly and the customer experience will be terrible, so I kept the selection small and tight.
Next, we’ve had to set up a payment service, as well as open a business bank account while I was at it. I was considering a business bank loan as an option at the time so it seemed adequate, but for that I had to work on my long term business plan.
Oh, and I set up an LLC too. This would give me easier access to suppliers and help me expand on what I could sell, especially because I was looking at international suppliers and I didn’t know any local ones at the time. Unfortunately, Brexit was in full swing so it wasn’t a viable option either for a start-up and it all ended up being just a hassle with paperwork. God, I hate bureaucracy.
But soon the website was live!
Marketing
Right, let’s tell the world we’re coming.
I got an old camera from my brother who works as a professional photographer and got myself some good quality product photos. It’s strange that now there are programs that can do the whole process in seconds. I was still exporting everything to my pc and rotoscoping each photo and adding some drop shadow. Such a laborious process! But they where very good in the end.
And these are by far my favourites. I made these videos as ads for YouTube at the time and they really do fill my heart with that what-could-have-been feeling.
So what happened next?
That’s it, it’s all set up right? When I stepped back and had a look at it, it was all very flat. It was very obviously amateurish and I wasn’t any closer to a long term business plan, but most importantly, I just wasn’t interested in commerce.
Dealing with finances and marketing just felt draining, I was constantly worried about money and income, and it didn’t come easy to me. I know it never does, but I had no joy in the process.
It did help me realize what I did enjoy though, the drawing and storytelling. I love creating stories and writing and I felt an enormous pull to it.
It made me realize that I couldn’t go at it casually and that to accomplish the bigger picture I’d have to fully immerse myself in the process and be ready to be in it for the long haul.
It really made me want to study and master art, now with the purpose of applying it to a specific end.
At the time of me writing this I am slowly transitioning from studying, to establishing and solidifying it all into what are now becoming the Magic Lantern books and I have all these failures to thank for it.
To you, from the home of magic.
Marco D Blanco.
I refuse to view your tremendous and tremendously creative project a ffff, see? I reject that word concept spell. And I applaud your Sailure that you brave and dare to do as sail toward your goal of -- what? Being your Self! Whoa! Success!!! Keep up your excellent work!