Branding

I like the name November West Wears but I have no idea if that will really become a brand name. It's a placeholder name on a project I've been toying with for many years.

I'm medically handicapped and it has limited what I can realistically do for money. I blog and have done freelance writing. It's not a sufficient income.

A lot of years ago, I figured out webcomics sometimes make real money and began trying to figure out how to do a webcomic. I've had several that went nowhere and are no longer online.

I get a lot of flak in online forums from people who accuse me of telling tall tales about my life and was considering making an autobiographical fantasy where I vented about my life and told stories about my life in metaphorical terms.

I told someone "Kind of like Mae West but the opposite sort of. Like Mae East maybe." They had no idea I said Mae, not May, and tossed out November West.

I actually kept BOTH. November Mae East is the maiden name of the character as a child and I was going to write a comic about meeting the future ex called "When East meets West."

Questionable Content is -- or was at one time -- the highest paid webcomic on the planet. It was originally a hobby and he lost his job, began selling T-shirts on his comic to help pay the bills and a year later it was supporting him and he was no longer job hunting.

Some of the T-shirts he sold initially appeared as T-shirts in the comic. I have a serious interest in clothing and had a corporate job at the time and have long wanted to make my own clothing line. I imagined I would dress my comic self in pieces I would like to have for real and develop a real clothing line.

I owned the domain name NovemberWest.com at one point and started the comic and was not able to do much with it because I was still very sick and working full-time. The circumstances fostered jokes mostly about my job because I had no life, my poor health fostered dark humor and I discontinued it fearing I would get fired for dragging the company.

I began this site -- NovemberWestWears.blogspot.com -- as a private sandbox. It wasn't a brand name. It was a place to privately develop ideas about a clothing line in line with imagining I would do a comic and it would help me make and sell clothes.

On the one hand, the black and orange site colors come from wanting to do an Addams Family style comic. They are Halloween colors.

In the other hand, if you want to display images on a website -- like a comic or clothes you are selling -- and want your audience to focus on the images, you should have a predominantly black, white or cream website with as little clutter as possible.

Orange and teal are the two most common colors on the Internet in part because a lot of people don't see that well. They are bright and can be seen.

I very recently -- like two or three days ago -- added a monarch butterfly to the site. Butterflies are a long-standing theme across my online activities, including on blogs and reddit.

It's a humorous coincidence that a black and orange butterfly is called a monarch. The word is gender neutral, comes from Greek and means "one who is first," not queen.

I have a subreddit called French wardrobe. A French wardrobe is a variation on a capsule wardrobe where you have some basics and try to keep up with trends without being a slave to fashion by adding just a few pieces per "season" and some people interpret that as twice a year and some interpret it as four times per year.

I happen to know a little French and someone on Reddit decided to list it as a bilingual sub due to the name. It's a good excuse to practice my college French occasionally so I said "I'll bite. We'll make it bilingual." And then started r/ClothingWords at some point to improve my fashion vocabulary in both English and French.

r/FrenchWardrobe was used for a time to curate photos I liked and three of those ended up on this site while it was a private sandbox intended to be a mock-up of a clothing line website. Those three photos were talked about in a post on a different blog of mine where I was just writing about clothes and posting it publicly because writing is what I do.

That post is dated September 30, 2024 and the earliest pieces on this site are dated October 3, 2024 but I think at that point it was still private. I wrote that piece and then soon removed everything here and began putting together ideas for the business end of things because something gelled in my mind.

Most likely, it was made public October 7, 2024, the date on my legal notice stating this is an elevator pitch and if you use these ideas, it's theft.

I like where this site is going. But it developed organically over a lot of years and if it becomes a real clothing line and actual professional PR people or whatever advise me to do something different, that's certainly not out of the question.