The Receipts

Radical transparency, but as a bit. (Except it's all real.) We sell AI-generated apparel and we pay real money to advertise it. Most brands hide their numbers. We are not most brands. We are barely a brand.

2026.09.30

Shopify sent us a bill for $40. We consulted our revenue projections, which indicated that earning those forty dollars back would take approximately infinity. Not a bad quarter. Not a slow year. The heat death of the universe, followed by an awkward conversation with accounts payable.

So we rebuilt the site basically from scratch instead of paying it.

This is the kind of financial discipline you can only exercise when you refuse to assign a dollar value to your own time. A sensible business would pay $40 and get back to selling shirts. We looked at the selling-shirts part of that sentence and decided we had time to rebuild the store.

The storefront, the catalog, the checkout: rebuilt. The machinery that turns a weird image into something you can wear stayed the same, thanks to the impeccable modular design principles we obviously had from the beginning. For once, a software architecture decision saved us work instead of becoming work. Please allow us this moment.

Same slop, new plumbing. We did not pivot. We did not raise a round. We received a modest invoice and reacted like it was an eviction notice.

To be clear, running our own site is not free. Servers cost money. Payments cost money. Our time costs money if you make the mistake of counting it. We have not discovered a business model. We have discovered a way to avoid giving Shopify forty dollars, which is different and apparently much more motivating.

Projected payback period: still infinite. But now we own the loading screen.

2026.08.17

Round two of paying strangers to perceive us is in the books: $86.14 to Reddit, July 12–25. And we want to open with the good news, because for once there is some. A 1.78% CTR and a $0.24 CPC. Those are genuinely good numbers. Suspiciously good. Agencies charge retainers to get numbers like that. The ad is doing its job so well we've started to resent it, because it keeps delivering people to us and then we do this:

Three hundred and fifty-eight people walked into the store and three hundred and fifty-eight people walked out. As conversion funnels go, ours is less a funnel and more a doorway we pay $0.24 a head to have people briefly stand in. We are elite at the first four seconds of commerce and have no documented evidence of any ability beyond that point.

Also, corrections desk. The mailing list technically has its first subscriber — but *it's management, testing the popup. It worked, in the sense that a mirror works. And while we're being honest: the one all-time order this page has been cherishing since March? Also management, testing checkout. Our lifetime revenue is our own money doing a lap. Real customers to date: zero. Real subscribers to date: zero. The old scoreboard below stands corrected; the humiliation compounds.

The campaign is paused while we bolt actual analytics onto the store — dwell times, bounce times, whether the popup even appears before you leave. Next round we won't just know that you fled; we'll know the exact second. Progress.

2026.07.12

Policy change. For the last month every design got 24 hours to sell before it was executed and buried in the boneyard, unbuyable forever. Very dramatic, extremely on brand, one flaw: executions need witnesses, and our traffic (see below — it has not improved) meant we were killing art in front of an empty room. Thirty-one designs died to prove that artificial scarcity requires actual people. Today we dug them all back up. The boneyard is now a store: everything in it is buyable, printed on demand, fresh from the grave. Nothing dies here anymore. (One design remains buried for reasons between it and management.) Sales since the mass resurrection: zero — but for the first time, zero has a full catalog to ignore.

2026.07.03

Status report: no new ad spend, no new sales. A perfectly balanced ledger — zero in, zero out. What actually happened was three weeks of pushing pixels around: the buy box is now a grid, the size chart tells the truth, and the drop machine learned some new tricks. None of it made money; it just made the not-making-money run smoother. Oh, and we added hoodies. $49.99. Nobody will ever buy one. We stock them the way a ghost town stocks a second saloon.

2026.06.11

The scoreboard

Ad impressions 14,487

Clicks 124

Ad spend $46.76

Orders from those ads 0

Orders, all time 1†

Emails captured 0

†The one order was in March, before any ads ran. At the time of writing we cherished them. We have since (2026.08.17, above) been forced to disclose that "them" was management testing checkout. We now cherish ourselves, which was always the more honest arrangement.

Which slop you click on

Design CTR Cost per click

Neon Reaper's Last Transmission 1.91% $0.25

Bleeding Steel Dreams 1.53% $0.21

Cosmic Cradle 0.74% $0.39

Horns Up or Die Trying (paused) 0.65% $0.41

Digital Void Mandala (paused) 0.54% $0.75

What this means

You will click on a glowing skull for a quarter, but nobody has bought one yet. We get it. It's AI slop. We said no apologies and we meant it — but we're also publishing the receipts until this page gets embarrassing in the other direction.

If you'd like to personally alter the trajectory of this page: the slop is right here. Email subscribers get free shipping, automatically.

Numbers read manually from the ad dashboards. Yes, this page is real. No, we don't know what we're doing either.