Celebrating 300 Articles: A Self-Important History of Swim Into The Sound Merch
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Last week, Swim Into The Sound sold out our first-ever run of t-shirts, and that’s unfathomably cool to me. First off, I wanted to thank everyone who encouraged me to make these shirts a reality, this was a fun project, and I’m proud to have a piece of this blog out in the world in such a concrete, physical way. Thanks even more if you’re one of the 20 people out there who are rocking it. Even if this shirt is just a goofy novelty item in your closet, it means the world that anyone would ever support me or my blog that much.
While we just published our 300th article last week premiering the new Grave Saddles single, this is almost the “spiritual” 300th post, as I would like to pause, break format, and write candidly for anyone interested in reading. To borrow a phrase from the inane and inspiring Comedy Bang Bang, I’m going to “break off a fresh ‘hundo.” Historically, my hundredth posts have been big, intentional celebrations of me, my music, and the site. In a way, this is very much “back to the roots” of the early days of Swim, where I treated this more like a personal blog than a “music publication.” Okay, I’ll stop self-mythologizing now.
When I started this article, it began as a thank you to anyone who bought a shirt, but now I want to recount how they were made and the (semi-secret) history of Swim Into The Sound merch. If that sounds interesting, read on; if not, understandable, have a nice day. Regardless, thank you for reading any of our previous 300 articles or buying one of our shirts. It’s a surreal feeling to have all of those out of my closet and off into the world. Thanks for supporting this blog and supporting independent music writing. It’s hard out here, but we do it all for love.
Swim Into The Sound has never made money. In fact, this blog has consistently lost me money. From day one, this was zero investment, with the site running 100% off Google Docs and Tumblr. I waded into any sort of financial commitment very gradually over the course of years. After I had run this thing for long enough and confirmed that it was something I wanted to keep doing, I bought a $20 domain from Godaddy and slapped it on my Tumblr page as a URL mask. Surprisingly, the move from “swimintothesound.tumblr.com” to “swimintothesound.com” did a lot to make this feel like a legitimate operation, even if it was just a top-line superficial change.
About a year later, I bought a (pretty massive) run of 4x4” stickers that I’m still milking to this day. Those stickers have lasted five years and, for a while, only existed as things I would stick up on light poles or dive bar bathrooms around Portland and Detroit. A month or two after I bought those stickers, I moved this whole operation over to Squarespace (yeah, boo, I know), but it felt like a move towards “independence” that I needed to make at the time. That same year, I paid a local photographer in the Portland DIY scene for usage rights to some of her photos from a recent Remo Drive concert. The beautiful, sweaty, grimy, black-and-white pictures you see on the home page are the imagery we’ve used since 2018.
The next merch I committed to was an order of guitar picks with the blog’s logo printed onto them. They’re incredibly light and probably more of a novelty than anything, but I just thought they would make cool “business cards” for when I met people at shows or wanted to tell someone about the blog. It didn’t have my name or email on it or anything, I just figured “if they google Swim Into The Sound,” they’d find me.
For a few years, any other money spent on this blog was either a domain renewal or buying another year of Squarespace. For some reason, I decided to order a one-off Swim Into The Sound Mug during the height of my 2020 Mania. I just bought it off one of those photo printing sites, so it’s “one of one,” and probably was more proof of concept than anything.
But I had always wanted to make a T-shirt. For years, I wanted to do even a weird little one-off with the logo on black, but never pulled the trigger. It didn’t help that, in the back of my mind, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the blog’s “normal” logo would look weird on a shirt. I still love our wordmark, color scheme, and the font I chose, but I just think it would look odd as words stretched across somebody’s chest.
About this time a year ago, I saw lead singer of Khaki Cuffs and Twitter Friend Brody Hamilton posting about their design work. Aside from some solid logo rips and iconic shitposting vision, I knew Brody could throw together a pretty gnarly metal logo, so I thought, ‘Why not?’ and decided to commission one.
The first time I saw this logo, I was absolutely geeked. When I got the final version, I sent it to pretty much anyone I thought would be able to read it. I didn’t want to destroy the “brand recognition” of my standard logo (I still like how bold and simple it is), but this metal logo essentially became the secondary mark for the site. Brody was kind enough to lay out a “square” version and a “horizontal” layout I could use as my Twitter header.
In August of 2022, I drove from Denver to Colorado Springs for a Short Fictions concert. I had never been to that city, so I was going around taking it all in the first time, trying to absorb the vibe. At one point, I was driving past a pretty nondescript business complex and saw a sign that read “Tees in Time.” My thought process was basically, “Huh, what if?” and I decided to get a quote the next day.
I finally had all the pieces I needed: a sick-ass logo that would actually look good on a shirt, disposable income, and just enough of a home base established here in Denver. I decided if I ordered a small run of shirts, I could give a few out to friends and maybe even sell a handful. Most of all, I wanted one for myself, but I figured I could probably make the numbers work on a small order.
This challenged me to learn about “ecommerce” and different ways to sell things online. Thanks to Jake from Grey Matter, Nick from Equipment, and Jake from No Fun Club, all of whom were kind enough to answer my (pretty stupid) baseline questions about running an online storefront. After a sufficient amount of research and finance wankery, I was spun up on LimitedRun and Pirate Ship. I had a minimal but clean storefront, and I was in business.
It was hard to predict how many of these shirts I was going to sell. I was potentially ready to sit on these for years, just like I have with my stickers, but after a few sales rolled in from some friends back in Detroit and a few Twitter pals, I was struck that anyone actually wanted these enough to pay real money. It wasn’t until some of these friends sent me pictures of them wearing the shirts that I realized I made shirts and sent them halfway across the country. Pretty cool moment.
Earlier this year, I decided my time in Denver had come to a natural conclusion. In about a week, I’ll be moving my band shirts, kitchenware, keepsakes, and other sundries back to Portland, Oregon, where I’ll hang out for the summer. I stared down ten-ish remaining shirts in my closet, discounted them, slapped the free shipping option on, and decided to sell em hard. In one day, I shipped out the final six shirts and had one less thing to move. Go me.
Then it hit me that (even though some were discounted) 19 people besides myself support whatever this is enough to own a shirt of it. That means the world to me, and I just wanted to capture that feeling of gratitude in this article today. That was a lot of backstory, numerical figures, and nitty-gritty details, but sometimes it’s nice to pull back the curtain and let you know how stuff like this runs. It’s easy to see how any support, financial or otherwise, can go so far at this scale.
I’ve had all the sales from these shirts piling up in my Paypal (an account I never use for anything) and cashed it all out at once. Twenty shirts and months worth of planning finally done. This was an experiment, and it’s reached a point where I can actually stop and reflect. The fact that it coincided so closely with our 300th article is just a happy accident.
I am feeling the love, and I always want to keep spreading that. As a way to pay it forward and spread the love, I’m making a donation to The Center on Colfax, which is an LGBTQ community center here in Denver. That wasn’t profit or money left over, it just feels like something that makes sense to do. Swim Into The Sound is a silly blog about emo music, and sometimes there are more important things we have to acknowledge and support and push out money toward.
This has been long and very masturbatory, but if you read this far, thank you. Three hundred posts is a huge milestone that’s worth celebrating. Moreover, when we published our massive Fauxchella interview last month, that article officially pushed the site to over 500,000 words published. It’s crazy to think that half a million words have been posted to this blog, and that’s a number that still trips me up a little.
Regardless, there’s lots to celebrate in an already awesome year. Thank you for everything.
Here’s to another 300 and half a milli more.
