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Zach Knickerbocker

@zachknickerbocker

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🌆 Manhattan, NY
👕 I design and sell t-shirts online.
👻 Read a caption!
👋 Software Developer. All views are my own.

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Another amazing year married to the love of my life! 3 of them now… crazy how time can fly. I love you @amanda.knickerb! ❤️

Dinner was at @gabrielkreuther and it really couldn’t have been any better. NYC is the best city on earth ❤️. by @zachknickerbocker

Late on the drop here, but had a great night out for Valentines Day at @benoitny with @amanda.knickerb ❤️.

Still, even a year after moving back to NYC, just eternally grateful and excited to be living in this city. There’s nothing more magical than a night out on the town, a fancy restaurant, and good food and drink. It’s what makes all the hard work worth it!

Speaking of… I need to do a little more of that “work” thing 😅. Have been a little distracted lately on the software side of things with Merch Wrangler, and my own internal software for managing my listings. But, things are going great! Just finished St Patrick’s Day listings for the season, and now finally working on some evergreen stuff. Really excited about that. by @zachknickerbocker

Working on St Patrick’s Day illustrations this week. I’ve got a couple designs I’ve been working towards, with the first step being drawing some shamrocks and 4 leaf clovers.

Of course the styles you can draw are endless, but here’s 3 I came up with using styles that are really popular right now. Curiously, it was basically impossible to get AI to generate remotely useable shamrock assets, but they’re easy enough to draw.

Have a favorite from these 3 art styles? I’m affectionately calling them “flat”, “retro”, and “shiny” (in clockwise order from the bottom left).

Next week I’m finally moving on from holiday designs. The entire spring, summer, and fall period is all about evergreens, and I’ve got a lot of ground to make up in my portfolio of aging designs on both Amazon Merch and Etsy. by @zachknickerbocker

I switched to Safari for my browser last year, which means no more Chrome extensions. For a while now, I’ve been begrudgingly hopping back over to Chrome to use extensions like DS Amazon QuickView, which shows you listing BSR, among other things, on the search page. If you’re an Amazon seller, you know how useful this is.

Anyway, I spent most of my day using AI to generate a new web extension for Safari that does the same thing: display BSR’s on the search page. I think it’s prettier than the competition, it works better, and it works in Safari. It’s friggin’ awesome.

I’m calling it RankWrangler, and I’m planning to make a couple other extensions for Amazon Merch and Etsy sellers as well. Mostly free, but in the future some paid, as a new source of revenue (which is exciting for me, as an ex-professional software dev)

If you have any suggestions for future extensions, or are a Safari user and want to help test RankWrangler, please reach out!

Super pumped about how this turned out 😁. On a personal front, I’m finally recovered from all the food poisoning nonsense. Got some new listings uploaded this week on Amazon, but next week need to accelerate, as well as get back to uploading on Etsy. Going to make it happen 💪. by @zachknickerbocker

It's a January business update! Swipe right for some insights on my goals in February, a review of sales in January, and how I'm thinking about the Amazon business right now.

Sorry about the brief hiatus. In case you missed the story, I've been suffering through a solid week of food poisoning. Combined with the pretty legit cold I had earlier this month, it's safe to say the universe tried to take me out. But, I survived, and I'm ready to make February a month to remember.

Hope you enjoy this content! Leave a note if you do. And, let me know if you've got any goals you're working towards in February. Curious to hear what you're up to. by @zachknickerbocker

Designing a cute St Patrick’s Day themed design in Kittl! With a little help from ChatGPT 😁.

Remember, it’s a good idea to create products for an upcoming holiday 2-3 months in advanced of the actual date. That way, your new products have a chance to settle into the marketplace and find some momentum with customers.

This is my first video of my actual design process. I’m excited to do more soon!

How do you think the design turned out? Comment below! by @zachknickerbocker

Day 22! It’s about -20 degrees here in NYC today, so I almost froze to death on my walk to the coffee shop 🥶.

😂 Worth it though. I get a little depress-y if I’m stuck in the house for too long. It’s nice to get out, see other people going about their lives, and co-work in a public space with some cold brew.

☕️ I snapped a pic of this quote just because I liked it. There’s a lot of truth to it - sometimes, even when you’re not getting results, you just need to put in the effort day in and day out. It might take a long time, but eventually your luck surface area gets so large, and you interact with enough random things, that good stuff starts happening. So don’t give up. Consistency is king.

👑 Hence why I continue to post here 22 days later. Feels terrible to be honest. I’m having a hard time figuring out what to post, how to take pictures of myself… the whole dang social media shabang. But just going to trust in the process and keep posting until I figure it out.

💪 Until tomorrow! Onward by @zachknickerbocker

Since a number people have asked, let’s do a quick Etsy update. When I heartlessly abandoned Instagram in the pre-COVID era, my shop was sitting at ~1,500 sales. Fast forward to now, and we’re closing in on 12,000 sales. Super excited about that!

💸 Amazon is still my main source of income, but Etsy’s been a surprisingly important component of overall yearly revenue for me. It’s worth the customer service headaches split focus because it brings in more profit per sale than Amazon, it allows me to sell art styles that I can’t sell elsewhere, and I get a lot of unique insights talking directly with buyers.

✨ I’m anxious but excited to test out a new venture on Etsy, actually. Something beyond apparel: digital downloads. It would give me an awesome excuse to bust out Procreate on my iPad more often, and it would provide really good content for Instagram, TikTok, etc.

📸 On that note... finding something to post every day has been a struggle, lol. Writing about something interesting to me isn’t hard, but getting a suitable picture is. I can only take so many pictures of myself. I do think posting more art creation is the way to go. Let me know if you have any suggestions (please!)

Onward! 🚀 by @zachknickerbocker

Day 20! Chillin’ with my plants and working on my first ever Procreate illustration: a donut. Fitting for a print on demand entrepreneur, huh? 🌱 🍩

I stumbled upon @happyfoxsupplyco awesome account and tutorials recently, and wanted to just dive a little deeper. The essence of it (imo) is that it’s a really approachable way to create original art. In a world increasingly dominated by AI, I think it could be a valuable skill and a way to stand out in the future.

So anyway, going to keep progressing down this path slowly. Not sure if I’ll start selling any of it on t-shirts, but who knows where it’ll go. My observation lately has been that Etsy is really firing on all cylinders, so I’m interested in expanding my t-shirt business there and maybe dabbling in some homegoods/digital products. A raster art style lends itself well to that, too. It’s cute!

Been a long day 😴. Hope you’re well ❤️. Onwards! by @zachknickerbocker

Day 17! With the help of Seeko the (mini) macaw here, I’m working on the last tranche of my 100th Day designs for the season.

😍 These designs have been fun, but I’m glad to be done with them to be honest. Placing 100 baseballs on a shirt is tedious work, lol.

🤢 Happy it’s Friday! This has been an outrageously unproductive week on account of being sick with this cold. I’m feeling incrementally better everyday, but it’s really just starting to drag on and bring me down a bit. It sucks to start a bunch of new goals and then be instantly derailed/challenged by sickness like this.

But, we press on. Determined to kick these goals in the butt on Monday. 😤

Happy Friday Y’all. Onward 💪 by @zachknickerbocker

Day 16! AKA my Birthday 🎉. I am extremely young, vibrant, motivated, and successful. That’s what I’m telling myself. lol

Anyway sharing a video of an illustration I did last night of a birthday cake. The “100” refers to the 100th Day of School, but I ended up removing the candles later because they didn’t blend in as well with the rest of the shirt as I’d hoped.

Off to celebrate my Birthday! Tomorrow is Friday, so make sure you get some work done today. It’ll take the pressure off of tomorrow. Onward 💪 by @zachknickerbocker