I drew all my artwork by myself in Procreate on my iPad with an Apple Pencil. Here are some of the early iterations of the ant artwork. I would like to take a moment to thank Justina and Mo for letting me spam them with the drafts.

I also experimented with doing some Jenny Holzer Truisms-style typography, but it always looked way better in my head than on the garment.

In the end, this is what I ended up making and selling in my shop. Justina helped me make my eyebrows look truer to life (i.e. the signature bushy Chong eyebrows).

My favorite part of the whole process was drawing all the ants in the flower backdrop, because they each convey a different emotion.

My merch made its debut at my unforgettable birthday/bootday party, where 100+ of my friends got to see me experience ego death on TV, and then commemorate it with a Tshirt bearing fan art... of me... drawn.. by me.

(Thank you Alison for the photos!!)

We raised $1000 for Anera in one night.

Then, when my boot was OFFICIAL and understood across time zones, I launched my online store. Some of the business nitty gritty: I already had http://jessicachong.com registered (it's hosted my personal site for more than a decade now), so I didn't need to pay a new registrar. (I use Cloudflare​, for the record.) For the storefront, I used Shopify​ and p​ointed http://shop.jessicachong.com's DNS servers to it. For the print-on-demand services, I used Printful because it crashed/froze less than the others ones I tried 🙈.

It was so heartwarming to see people send me pics of their merch from around the world! I haven't posted pics of people with their goodies because I didn't have time to ask for permission before impulsively sitting down to write this tome, but please know that I am thankful for you for SEEING ME and liking my ART!!

So how much did I make in the end? Not a ton. If you want to sell stuff, you have to constantly be marketing. Which is hard, because I've never used my social media accounts as transactional spaces; they've always been a place for me to express myself and share a bit of myself with the world. (And I'd like to continue using them that way.) Anyway, I noticed with great alarm that people only bought stuff when I created a sense of urgency around it (e.g. did marketing). Earlier this month, I forgot to cancel my Shopify subscription ($39.00/month). I made a desperate Instagram story where I said "I'm closing my shop at the end of the week!", and made a few more sales. Then I withdrew all the money and donated it! Here are the receipts.

Anyway, in true Jessie fashion, I've also been very conflicted about the whole enterprise. I was deeply affected by the Story of Stuff​ project when I first saw it in 2009.

I have feelings about the ease with which we buy stuff without asking: Whose water is polluted by industrial waste? Whose lungs are infected by inks, dyes, toxins? How much textile waste is created when fabric is cut? Whose backs and fingers and joints are aching, eyes are straining, while they toil to make the t-shirts?

As someone who sews, I am always floored by how little I pay for a garment; I know how much time, effort, precision, and care goes into making each one. At the same time, I also know how nice it is to hold something that means something to me—a hat with a funny drawing by an artist I admire, a mug from my favorite TV show. That means I'm responsible for putting and moving at least 74 more items into the world; I hope they live to the full extent of their usefulness.

I’d like to add that I mulled all of this over with my endearingly principled husband; any misgivings I had about selling merch, he had severalfold. Erring, always, on the side away from the vanity and the consumerism, but still trying to find ways to support me. At one point, he even tried to persuade me to screen-print all the t-shirts at a local shop, and ship them from our own apartment

I said “Bro… you’re going to be the one managing the stamps.com account… and don’t kid yourself if you think you’re going to enjoy turning our SF apartment into a warehouse…” …