When I decided to make quick videos of swatching the 2024 inkvent calendars, I thought it would be a quick little project that I would put on Youtube, and that would be it. I had no idea that I would really enjoy the filming and video process, so as I continued to make videos, it was starting to become natural. While I love doing videos about new pens or papers, I felt like there had to be something else to do with the Youtube channel. I did a few live streams on Youtube, and I really like the interaction of people asking questions, so I started to wonder how I could continue to get that the interaction with other people, so that is when the idea came to light.
The stationery hobby is odd in that many aspects of it can have no social interaction, but when pen people get together, they always seems to want to share or show off their new pens or papers, so that interaction is normally limited to pen clubs or pen shows. I am lucky to have a couple of stores, and a very active pen club in the Nashville area, but I wanted to be able to talk to other people and bring attention to pet makers, stationery stores, or people tied in with the hobby who a larger audience might not have heard of or be familiar with.
As I was starting to get ready to go to the Arkansas Pen Show, I had already started the research to see how I could make interviews work. I knew that I would have an opportunity at the show to talk to people about interviews once I was ready to get them going. I was able to do a livestream tour of Vanness with Lisa Vanness, and that was in a way a rough test of what would evolve into the DWRDNET Stationery Feed that is now coming up on Episode 8.
I have been lucky to have existing connections with quite a few people to help me get started, but I have also had to take a leap to reach out to people who I have never met or spoken to, but I like their products or store and want to talk to them about it and help to give them a different audience to help spread the word about their business. This is not something that I ever considered I would be doing, but now it is starting to feel natural and I am enjoying the process of finding new people to talk to for future episodes.
I think it is important to support all of these small businesses as much as possible, since competing with someone like Amazon is a massive challenge. A small business is going to see the effect of every purchase in a way that someone like Amazon never would. Many of these businesses are running their store as a second job, so this is something that they are passionate about and by supporting them, everyone benefits.
So if you haven’t yet had a chance to watch any of the episodes, I would suggest checking them out. I have had people tell me that it has been great to put on in the background to listen to while working on other tasks. There are some episodes that are more visually driven, like the interview with Lisa of Olive Octopus Ink where watching is going to allow you to see all of the swatching techniques, but the audio only versions are also available if that is how you choose to consume media.
You can check out the video feed at https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwFAC_8KRdr4AnR1IhPION7BN-fQvIF7E or if you can find the audio versions on Youtube, Spotify and Apple Podcast with hopefully more podcast providers to come in the future.
If you have suggestions of people that you would like me to try to interview, please leave those suggestions in the comments, as I have an initial list, but part of the fun of this is finding out about people I haven’t heard of and learning about them and their offerings as I am able to help share them with others.