October 14, 2026
Two years ago today, I launched IsLoved.
I had an idea, a little time on my hands, and a curiosity about what one person could accomplish with the creative tools that were suddenly becoming available.
Mostly, though, I wanted to make more art.
I'd spent much of my career designing things for other people, and I wanted to create something entirely my own. A little shop filled with artwork celebrating the people, animals, places, and things we love.
I gave myself a hundred days to see what I could build.
And I built quite a lot.
A Shopify storefront, hundreds of designs, thousands of product variations, and a rather complicated system for creating artwork and getting it onto everything from coffee mugs to blankets.
I also made plenty of mistakes.
I discovered that automation is remarkably good at reproducing errors at scale. That advertising can cost considerably more than the sales it generates. And that filling a shop with thousands of products isn't necessarily the same thing as creating a shop people want to visit.
By Day 100, I'd learned enough to know how much I didn't know.
And I needed to go back to work.
The Long Pause
So I put IsLoved on the shelf.
For about a year and a half, I concentrated on my career, paid the bills, and let the little shop quietly exist in the background.
I never quite stopped thinking about it, though.
There were still illustrations I wanted to make, collections I wanted to explore, and ideas about how the whole experience could be better.
Sometimes a little distance is useful. Things that seemed terribly important when you're in the middle of building something become less important when you have time to think about them.
I realized I didn't really want a shop with thousands of products.
I wanted a shop filled with things I loved making.
Picking It Up Again
In late July, I decided to give IsLoved another go.
Not a grand relaunch. Just a few little sprints, mostly on evenings and weekends, to see how far I could get.
As it turns out, quite far.
Over the past couple of months, I've redesigned the storefront, reorganized collections, developed new artwork and illustrated guides, and built more reliable ways to move an idea from an illustration to a finished product.
I've also finally launched something I've wanted to offer for a long time: custom commissions.
You can now send me a photograph of someone or something you love, and I'll create an illustration just for you.
Your dog. Your grandmother. The house you grew up in.
It feels particularly close to the original idea behind IsLoved. Making something personal, something connected to a memory or a feeling, and turning it into a little piece of art you can keep.
Building My Own Little Studio
Something else happened along the way.
As I experimented with new creative tools, I found myself spending an increasing amount of time managing the work surrounding the artwork.
Ideas scattered across conversations. Inspiration saved in a dozen places. Projects, production schedules, research, and unfinished experiments.
So naturally, instead of finding a simpler way to manage all of that, I decided to build an entire application.
It's called IsLoved Studio.
Part creative workspace, part project management system, and part experiment in working with AI, it's becoming the place where I organize the creative and technical sides of the business.
I'm building it myself, with the help of AI development tools, and learning an enormous amount along the way.
Some parts work beautifully. Others are still taking shape. And occasionally I spend an entire evening fixing something that was working perfectly well the day before.
Such is the joy of making software.
But it's also opened up a fascinating question: what happens when one person can work with some of the capabilities of an entire creative studio?
I'm still finding out.
The Things Worth Making
Looking back at these two years, I'm struck by how little of that time I've actually spent working on IsLoved.
The first hundred days were a sprint. Then came a long pause. And now, a couple of months of evenings and weekends have brought the project further than I expected.
It hasn't been a steady climb. More a series of experiments, detours, and occasional bursts of enthusiasm.
And that's okay.
The shop is still small. I'm still learning how to find customers, how to make the business sustainable, and how to balance all the things I'd like to do with the hours available to do them.
But something has changed.
In the beginning, I was fascinated by how much technology could help me produce.
Now I'm much more interested in what it can help me create.
The difference matters.
Over the coming weeks, I'll share more of the work happening behind the scenes: the artwork, the creative processes, the little studio I've been building, and some of the experiments that didn't go quite according to plan.
There's a lot to tell.
But for today, I'm going to celebrate two years of IsLoved.
Two years ago, I started an online shop.
What I was really trying to build was a way to make more art.
And somewhere between the little sprints, the long pauses, and the occasional late night, I think I'm finally figuring out how.
Here's to year three.
And to making more of what we love.
❤️
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