Introducing "Big Shadows"
**Edit: Dec 15, 2023 - I actually posted this on my Lazy River Design Works blog about a month ago, and have been trying to import it to this blog ever since. Today, I gave up and just did a copy and paste of the text. That means no pics for now, but if I have time I will drop some in later.
I feel like the time has come to finally pull my own personal trigger on the whole "Find your niche" thing. It's good, solid advice for those in the POD/dropshipping game, especially now as the market becomes super saturated. This is due (in large part) to the increasing quality and availability of AI image engines like Dall-E and the one I use, Midjourney. It's so easy to make pretty pictures that it's only to be expected that people are going to use it as a side hustle. That makes uniqueness and strength of design more important than ever if one is going to stand out and attract some attention from the market.
After a lot of experimenting and deliberating, I've decided to embrace a style and subject matter that has always been close to my heart - film noir. The traditional film noir aesthetic (along with more its more modern neo noir interpretations) has a built-in audience, a high nostalgia factor, strong and recognizable tropes/elements, and a world-building flexibility that can accommodate a range of quirky interpretations. I fell in love with the genre as a young teen with my first exposure to some of the great Bogart films - "The Big Sleep," "The Maltese Falcon," and "Key Largo." As I got older, I realized that the essentials of the aesthetic survive in modern takes such as "The Big Lebowski," "No Country for Old Men," and "Memento." When I first started playing around with Midjourney, I spent a lot of time using the concept of an underwater noir world as a subject for learning on and experimenting with. I even had a name for the city I was envisioning on the ocean floor, "The Big Murk." There's a decent chance that would have been the name for this more focused project if it hadn't already been taken by Big Murk.
A morning of Googling revealed that all of the good names using "noir" that I could think of were already taken. Eventually, I came up with "Big Shadows" as a very evocative and apt name that captures the film noir aesthetic while also leaving room for other dark and shadowy content. The store is now open for business and the inventory is growing.
Stay tuned for further developments!