June 14, 20225 Year Anniversary

Omnitype 5 Year Anniversary Celebration - Day 2

LET'S GO BACK…

As part of the celebration, each day of this week leading up to the sale, we will be highlighting a moment from our history that you may not know about!

...TO THE BEGINNING OF KEYBOARD MERCH

Soon after we released our stickers and launched our store in June 2017, we released our first apparel items in July of the same year. I still hadn't gotten to actual keyboard products and was just focused on having an outlet to design and have fun in the hobby I loved!

The Rubreh Domeh shirt and the rmk Dad Hat were among the first keyboard themed merch items available in the market at the time, and I was so excited about them! Bringing a community meme to life for everyone to enjoy and connect with was great, and I continued to think this was going to be the future of the business. Being a graphic designer, my skills transferred easily to merchandise. Seeing as I had never ventured into the third dimension in my design work, the thought of actually designing real keyboard products seemed like a far reach.

Unlike our first stickers drop, I did a pre-order for these two items because I did not have the capital to fund the minimum order requirements - the tens of dollars the sticker sales brought in just wasn't enough lol. We sold probably around 50 of each, which seemed like a mountainous total at the time! After only a couple months in business, I was excited to continue to design more shirts, hats, stickers and other merch for the keyboard community.

Fun Fact: The very first prototype unit of the rmk dad hat was taken by the Gulf of Mexico in August 2017. RIP.

Up until this point, my friends and family probably thought it was just a weird nerdy hobby, which technically it was. I had just found this burst of fulfillment in design that I was just not getting at my day job as a designer. There is just something different about designing whatever you want for yourself than just doing what someone else tells you to ‘design’ at a job. Little did I know, just a few months later, something would happen that would open my eyes to the possibilities of what the business could become.

Tomorrow we will discuss that monumental turning point in our business that changed everything.