Drop Shipping learning

Beginnings

Drop shipping globally, with no connection to those who were collecting. Little earnings per item, following an entire supply chain of labor all earning little for their contributions. In February of 2014 I launched my first products.

basketball dreams and redwood trees

The two most sold images, printed on a variety of products, all shipped to locations I’ll never know and never see. A step in the right direction the experience was, I am certainly thankful for all of those who enjoyed the images enough to put them in their homes. Those were learning lesson steps and I had to move on to better quality. I have over the years, spent much time and effort to find solutions to the mass produced quality of most drop shipping sites. This in addition to over a decade of cannabis experience, both encouraged me to source from small businesses, with environmentally friendly practices as much as possible. In came hemp.

Prints meet NFTS

In September 2022, I launched prints on my own site. Printed on archival hemp from Hahnemühle, at a small family owned print shop located in the middle of the nation. I wasn’t able to sign them, but a few friends and family started supporting.

I went to Twitter to market my new prints, and little did I know…there was a World of artists selling digital tokens on a permanent ledger, with developer teams building permanent decentralized storage that was not AWS and Google.

fixing the flaw

I removed my prints from my site, and began to work out the problem of authenticating prints via blockchain. I knew keeping track of collectors would be of importance due to experiences with other drop shipping sites, and the certificate of authenticity was ok, but enough.

After a year an a half of studying the world of “web3”, drafting spider maps and researching print shops and drop mechanics…I’m still not sure there is a “perfect” way to distribute tokens of authenticity for physical prints, while still honoring anonymous identities of the collector, but the path is a little clearer so it’s about time to give it a trial and error test in a few different ways. A lot of this is now possible thanks to Manifold and the ecosystem of teams working on Arweave projects.

In the meantime, before the trail and error, anything on here is available for minting requests. Community curation. Sets of collections will be minted to match prints and books as time moves along, if you’re interested in curating those collections feel free to send a message. <3

The aim is to allow 1 of 1 holders an option to order a physical print by submitting their shipping information directly to the printer. Being a holder, allows each to determine the print edition size: hold and be the sole owner, sell and allow for print number two to be released. The metadata will be updated to match the next edition for the secondary holder and so on. 2/1 after 1/1 (first holder) and 3/1 after 2/1.

All photography will be minted on the same contract One Light, divided into three main categories: Natural Light, Human Light, and Man Made Light. Within those categories will also be traits divided by Camera, Format, Location, and Year. Use a platform to search the currently available traits.

In the future, I will build a database stored on ArDrive to show the camera Metadata for each token as well. <3

A piece that keeps me going, I never imagined these tools coming to life when I started on Society6, nor even when I was working as a digital archivist. We should never give up hope…there is always something new coming to brighten the arts and community as time goes along. Keep painting the world with light and shadow, friends.