I Took the Leap, Here Is What I Built & Who Helped Me Start
A new video is live and this one is personal.
After over 300 rejections in a single year, 2 degrees, and more than a decade of experience across my fields, I made a decision. I stopped waiting for someone to choose me and I chose myself instead. This video is the starting point of everything. It is my why. It is the moment I decided to go all in on my art business rather than continue chasing a system that was not working, not just for me but for a lot of people right now.
The economy is not great. The job market is brutal. And at some point you have to stop blaming external forces or yourself and just take the chance on the thing you have always wanted to do. For me that thing is this. Dreamlike Innovations. My art. My shop. My terms.
And speaking of where it all started, I want to talk about how the very first stickers in this shop came to be, because that story deserves its own space here too.
When I decided to test whether this business was actually viable I needed a real starting point. Not just designing and sitting on files but actually producing something, putting it out into the world, and seeing if people would buy it. Because if they did, that was my signal to go all in. And they did.
For that first run I partnered with a local manufacturer in New Jersey called Death By Stickers. They are located close to an area I know well, somewhere I spent a lot of my teen summers, the same stretch I used to walk along to get to concerts to see bands like We Came As Romans, A Skylit Drive, and I See Stars. So there was already something that felt right about starting there, a full circle moment in a way! This was around the ages where my mom told me to give up art for good and “Get serious,” so it really felt like something meaningful.
The experience taught me more than I expected. It was my first time designing for print and even from that first round I walked away with a lot of knowledge. The guys there were genuinely cool, the turnaround was 2-4 days for pickup, the color and feel of the product was great, the quality was solid, and the low minimum order quantity starting at 10 per design for an affordable price was exactly what I needed at that stage! They also gave me more of the designs they personally loved most, which was a really sweet touch.
That said I also learned things I will carry into every print run going forward. The bleed process there works with RGB rather than CMYK, which means color matching to a specific palette is limited to basic options and some of my designs still came out with an extra white bleed I had not asked for. Most shops default to white bleed as a standard so it is not unusual, but I want full control over how the finished product looks and that matters to me. I also realized I needed to make my artist name larger across several designs because on some of them it was barely visible, and that is not something I am willing to compromise on going forward. A few of the cuts were slightly off depending on the design as well.
I also knew going in that manufacturing stickers at this scale means operating at a loss in the short term. Dead stock is a real consideration when you are just starting out. The low MOQ made it workable but it confirmed that working with an outside manufacturer only makes sense once the business has grown to support that volume. Right now everything is being handled in house on my own machines, which gives me the control over quality and output that I always wanted. I may return to Death By Stickers down the line if volume ever exceeds what I can keep up with myself. But the long term goal is to keep production exactly where it is now and scale it from there. That is the vision and I am already living it.
Watch the full drive and first pickup in the video linked above.
