We don't want to be a faceless product...

This is the first of a weekly blog to keep you up to date with everything DJTees that me and Dawn are doing because we felt we didn’t just want to be a faceless ‘product’ website but something more personal.

At the moment we’ve been preparing our house on the west coast of Scotland for sale. In reality this has meant Dawn (an inveterate fixer-up of things) has been painting, repairing and planting for months because I can’t, post-stroke.

This is all part of our long-term plan to retire from DJTees, when we’ve moved. We’re in our 24th year now and in truth we probably don’t have the energy for it that we did in 2002. It comes to us all, I suppose and we’re both 64 now.

One thing you notice when you do something like this is just how much rubbish you accumulate over the years. Piles of ‘it might come in useful’ stuff that never does. So there have been endless trips to the dump and charity shops, including with a big box of adult nappies(diapers) that were never used but I was issued with when I left hospital! Funny thing is, they sold from the charity shop before we’d even left.

Of course you unearth bits and pieces from your life that you’d forgotten. We found stuff that was packed in boxes in 2014 two moves ago. So since we’ve survived 11 years without it, we obviously don’t need it, so we’ve decided to throw all that out. I mean I have order books from 1992 in the loft. Why? I have no idea.

So that’s ongoing. The estate agent told us it could take up to three months. And we’ve got to find a new place, this time on the drier and sunnier east coast. So it seems likely to take some time yet. It all means life is a bit chaotic right now.

In the meantime we’ve been organising passing DJTees on to Andy, a friend and musician who will basically be the new me. But more of that nearer the time.

Hand in hand while doing this, Dawn’s been keeping up with designing new shirts from the highways and byways of rock history, including that great avant garde late 60s band The United States Of America and in contrast John Sykes and Albert Lee both incredible guitarists.

We’ve been exploring using AI both in analysis of data and in designing. I must admit as an analogue man, it all seems very techy and a little impenetrable but we’re both keen not to be alienated by it just because we grew up in an era that would think such a thing belongs on Star Trek. At the moment we’re on the outside of it and it seems such a big world to get involved in. I think 24 years ago we would have embraced it with more gusto and it might have made life easier.

While I’m here, do you know about the Etsy store we launched 6 weeks ago? https://djtshirtsthatrock.etsy.com same designs but some people prefer shopping there instead of www.djtees.com

That’ll do for this week.

Johnny