2022 Roundup

😈 First of all I want to thank you all – our customers and our followers (who are quite often the same!) – for having an opportunity to connect with you with my art and our decorations. Without you guys there would have been little to no sense in running the whole thing 😅 I wish you the most amazing 2023!

❤️ 🤘 Below will be a round-up of our 2022 – the most important stuff. I tried to make it short but I couldn’t lol

✊ What a year it was! One thing that defined this year for our business was the War. 10 months have passed since Putin started the war against the Ukraine and it is as heartbreaking now as it was on February 24th. As I said before being born in Moscow in the mid 80s I was growing up with a notion that Ukrainians are our brothers and seeing this slaughter was something absolutely unimaginable and devastating.

🙄 But the sanctions against Russia were imposed on everybody – it didn’t matter what were one’s views on the situation. Our shop on Etsy was instantly shut down because of its Russian origin, it became nearly impossible to send money to Russia because of PayPal, Western Union and other money-transferring services have left the country, UPS and FedEx also stopped operating there and the icing on the cake was the Russian Post that now doesn’t ship to a number of countries.

🦾 So I had to turn the order processing of our business around. They say diversifying risks is super important so being a very anti-Putin person for the last 22 years (since he became the president of Russia in 2000) I became an Israeli citizen 5 years ago. So this part was relatively easy – I was already receiving payments to my Israeli account for the last few years. Moving the production outside of Russia seemed to be a very hard task.

🍀 Luckily the UV-Tapestry production partnership we started with Glowtronics (from the US) a couple of years earlier was already there and guys have just produced their first sample canopies when everything seemed to collapse. Honestly, without their help a lot of you guys wouldn’t have the decos you bought this year. So thanks again to Ronnie and his team! ❤️

🎢 The transition wasn’t smooth though. I should thank all of you guys who had some issues with our new production but trusted us so that we could eventually make it up to you. We really appreciate your understanding and commitment to our brand. Now we are confident that the quality of our products is high and the delivery time has even improved comparing to 2021. So despite of all the difficulties we are now better than we were a year ago.

🏗️ We were having a few size-related issues after moving the production to the US because our printing partner had one vision on sizes and I had a different one and a couple of times we accidentally shipped wrong size prints. So to eliminate the possibility of future mistakes we agreed on one size chart. Some of products in our shop will have different sizes soon. It will be beneficial for you guys because different elements (diamonds, triangles, petals and hexagons) will fit better in terms of sizes. So the month of January 2023 will be all about updating the sizes on our Etsy store and on our website.

🤖 Another game-changer that is now on the horizon is the AI art that allows me to try out different styles and not be limited by the brain of only one person (haha). I did an experimental “Hell-o-Ween” collection that was probably 80% AI art and 20% real human art. Our customers from Liquid Dimensions were happy with these decorations that they were using for their Halloween party in Geneva. And we have recently launched a series of Marijuana Astronaut UV-Tapestries that are almost 100% AI art. So having that in mind I will certainly continue the experiments with new technologies in 2023.

🔥 There are some other changes that will come next year but we’ll be posting about them later. 🥳

Happy New Year everybody and see you soon! 💚