Where Did That Star Trek Shirt Go?, and other sagas in business ownership

"Hey, didn't you once have this one Star Wars shirt?"

We did. We used to have the Star Trek IDIC symbol in a combination of pride flags. We had some Star Wars Rebellion shirts. We had a bunch of video game shirts, too.

That was always illegal, always violating a copyright. And while copyright is, in

and of itself, a complicated topic, especially since NerdyKeppie is a company with an international following, we're also a company with very well-defined moral stances, and a company with employees who depend on us. Keeping those items was an ethical and legal exposure we knew we just could no longer afford.

So if you're here looking for that one Overwatch shirt you saw five years ago, it's gone. We made the decision that's both ethical and (we think) super cool of us -- anybody can use a clipping mask and put a trans pride flag over a Star Wars Rebels icon, or put a bi pride flag and a gay pride flag over the Infinite Diversity In Infinite Combinations icon, sure. But NerdyKeppie has an incredible amount of queer art which belongs to us or which is properly licensed by us, and we've decided to focus in that direction going forward. It's not just legal and ethical, it makes for much cooler work.

We're incredibly proud of our original designs, our PostNormCore collection, and our guest artists. We've worked hard to create the things we bring to you. Our collection of political punk patches continues to grow, and we've added pride skirt after pride skirt in thirteen different pride flags. Our collection of dresses with pockets stacks up against any in the industry, and we constantly look for more options to supply you with the sort of subtle pride clothing you can wear anywhere but still be seen. Quality Queerwear isn't just a tagline: it's our mission.

There are lots of cool and original fandom artists out there who focus on transformative work, and we can either choose to focus entirely on that space, or to focus on making original patterns which have a much broader appeal. We're already in a niche by choosing to focus on political patches and queer pride clothing, and if we choose to lay fandom over that, it puts us into such a narrow lane that we don't have as much room to grow -- especially since that's not our main focus.

tl;dr: yeah, we used to have that. We don't have it anymore -- we've decided to focus on our original work going forward so we can be your favorite store for a new bi pride dress, pansexual pride shoes, or ace pride button up shirt that you can wear to work, to a wedding (it's happened!) or to a convention, too.