Fatally Yours

We were very happy to be asked by the website Fatally Yours if they could interview us. What a great review of our product. I like reading reviews and seeing that people understand our product and even make up their own stories about what our designs are.

Because of all the blogs that write about us, the sites that review us, the shows we attend, and most importantly you telling someone else about us; everyday we get either another myspace friend, or another twitter follower, or another facebook fan. We constantly appreciate all the support. Please go here to read our Gory Gear Product Review!

HXC Netherlands

Here's some photos of our Netherland family Meet the Storm. Check out these awesome pics. The vocalist has blood on his face in one of the pics. I'm guessing it was a pretty crazy show! They're editing some video for us to see for ourselves. But for now go check out their latest studio recorded track on their myspace, it's really tight!

Moved

So it's done. We've moved! The new place is a great old building with old wood moldings and handmade windows. We can finally have our work area separate from our living space. We're still a duplex but very much our own and apart from the other people living in the same building. It's going to be fun to work their all winter printing shirts, as opposed to last winter where we trying to figure out how to screenprint and what we wanted Akumu Ink to be. Dora and I have tons of ideas that will be realized in the winter months up ahead. So stick around to see all these new and exciting things we'll come up with!

Moving Finally

So It's been about six months since we first got the news that we were being kicked out of our apartment. And finally tomorrow we actually get to leave this forsaken hell hole for a way better location. We're going to be within walking distance to the post office it'll be great!

As far as orders go, I printed yesterday, and I'll be printing sunday night so it's like we didn't even take a day off ;)

Also we just received the hoodies yesterday, so in a couple days we'll take the photos and within a week we should have everything up on the website for you to order. Also I've got to go get those paper toys printed on some nice durable paper.

See you soon from our new place.

Trick or Treat!

With the purchase of any of our hoodies I will be including a limited edition paper toy (limited to 50). What is a paper toy? It's a printed sheet of quality paper that you can cut out, fold, and glue/tape into a killer little figure to put on your shelf and show off to your friends. I wanted to make something that would be original and stylish while keeping with our Japanese-horror style. Hopefully you'll enjoy this toy as much as I enjoyed designing it :)






































Here is a preview video of the final product:

October Preview

In October we will have hoodies. We are in the process of moving to our new apartment so we will be a week or 2 behind on releasing those to you, but they will come.

We will also limit a few of our tshirt designs until they are sold out. Then they will be laid to rest, and those fortunate to own those shirts will be the only ones to do so.

Alongside the hoodies we will be releasing something new. An extension of our style and our look. Here's a preview:

Sungazer

Last night we were going to see my friend's band Sungazer perform their first concert/birthday party. When we finally got downtown to the venue (Cafe Chaos) the bouncer stopped Dora and asked for her ID. Dora unfortunately lost her ID a couple weeks ago therefore we couldn't get in to the concert :( The worst part is that this is the second time this happens to the same person.

Fortunately we were able to get him to come out and let him know our intentions were good. I'm really sorry Marc! I hope you had a fun time anyways and hope you liked your birthday present, please send some photos or video so I can put them up here ;)

Dim Sum

This morning was really nice. We finally got a chance to relax and go to Chinatown for some dim sum with friends from my day job. Here are some pictures of us acting like we've never gone out before:















This is Chu-Ying and Joannie.


















This is Azad and Chu-Ying drinking their tea.

















Azad was impatient.

















Here's Dora and myself.

















Here's some baby squid.
















I don't know what these things were. Azad's had a claw in it.

















This is Joannie showing a complete lack of respect for chopsticks, haha.

















Yum.

















Azad had one request from the moment we got there for some marinated pork. He was very pleased to receive it.

New Store!

So we're going to be in another boutique! In a couple weeks you will be able to get your Akumu Ink fix at the Lions Laier Boutique in Castlegar, British Colombia.

Tattoo Show Pics...The Moon Festival

I thought we took alot more photos of the show but most of them came out blurry. Not even worth showing... Here's 2 clear pics that are decent:
































In other news, Dora and I celebrated Moon Festival with some tea and a store bought mooncake. I may be wrong about the legend surrounding this festival but this is what I paraphrased from wikipedia... Once there were ten suns that appeared in the sky. The Emperor ordered his best archer to shoot down nine of the suns. When he was done the Goddess of Western Heaven repayed the archer with a pill of immortality. But his wife found the pill and took it. She was then banished to the moon as a result.

Very dark almost vampiric story. I love it. Let us celebrate every year on the fifteenth day of the eighth month of the lunar calendar together.

The Price Difference

I just want to make it clear for anyone who might have been wondering. At the tattoo shows we were charging 28.00$ per shirt, but on akumuink.com the same tshirts go for 21.00$.

'Why?' you may be asking yourself? On www.akumuink.com the shirt is 21.00$ but you have to take into consideration the 3.95$ of shipping, and the waiting period of 1-4 weeks depending where you're buying from. We charge more at the shows because we have to pay for our flight, hotel, the booth itself, etc... And you also get the advantage of getting your item right there on the spot as opposed to waiting.

So please know we're not trying to scam anyone. We're offering you a quality handmade product all made here in North America. We let everyone of you know that our website exists and that you can buy everything off the website. So please keep checking back with us.

I'm going to try to post pictures of the show tomorrow.

The Last Show

So it's been a little more than 7 months since we've launched. Yesterday we just completed our third tattoo convention for the year and we feel great. We really appreciate all the people who came to check us out and are now wearing Akumu Ink. All kinds of people from a 12 year old kid to a 72 year old tattoo artist everyone found something for themselves. Even people wearing big brands like Ed Hardy and Affliction found our shirts desirable.

We really appreciate all those who came out to the 2008 Montreal Tattoo Art show and discovered Akumu Ink for the first time. We are aware some people just came to pick up a souvenir for a girlfriend or boyfriend, but hopefully some of you found that we are more than just that. We have a lot of space to grow, so hopefully you will come with us for the ride.

Thanks you for supporting us. It's because of you that we've gotten this far.

The Joker

I found this on YouTube, this guy impersonates the Joker and it's amazing. Everything is spot on in his voice all the way down to his breathing and the sound of him licking his scars. Worth watching. He's got a bunch more videos when you search 'Joker impersonation'.

The Real Jurassic Park

I saw this on the Hundreds website today. It's soo awesome! I've watched this video so many times today while showing it to different people at work. Dora and I are totally going to plan a trip to the LA Museum of Natural History to see this Walking with Dinosaurs exhibit....we probably won't go but it would be soo cool to see this up close. Check it out, you won't be disappointed.

Montreal Art Tattoo

I can't believe there's only 3 days left until the Montreal Tattoo Art Show! That went by insanely fast, and I have so many prints that need to be produced that I haven't yet started.

We'll be there this Friday at 6pm until 8pm Sunday. It's at the Gare Windsor, near the Bell Center. I still don't know where to park yet but it will be totally accessible by metro. Please come down and say hi and check out all the other awesome artists and vendors.

Back When I did Comics

Once upon a time before I ever would have thought that I'd be making tshirts, I used to make comics. Never was a big fan of reading super hero comic books, but I was somewhat into the art from black and white independent comic books. I had a few mini comics (a mini comic being a 6 to 24 page book that's printed on regular sized paper in black and white usually and stapled in the middle) that I was hustling to my friends and classmates and even to a comic shop in town. I enjoyed doing them at the time, keeping busy and producing these little stories. I even got my girlfriend at the time to write a story for me and then I found another writer later on through some writers forum. I got one 3-paged story published and we started working on a second one but it never got finished. Anyways, so here is a little sample of my indie comic past:




































(the website joeypoulin.com doesn't work anymore. It was for my online portfolio back in 2005)

Selling Retail

Lol, yeah next months hoodies wasn't to be mentioned yet...but it's ok. I won't tell you anymore right now though. Dora and I are coming up with tons of ideas for the next couple of months, and let me just say it's gunna be awesome.

Also I want to mention that lately we've had interest from retailers that want to wholesale our product but they are claiming that our wholesale price is to expensive for them. And I wonder how much they expect us to lower our price to for them considering we do print on American Apparel tshirts, we do print and heat everything by hand, and we do have full time jobs. We would rather decline being in their store if it means we either have to cheapen our product to make a profit, or if it means that we have to produce a product that wouldn't profit us whatsoever.

Let's just keep creating quality shirts for you guys, and next month start making quality hoodies. Please help us if you know friends with blogs willing to talk about us, friends with tattoo shops willing to sell our stuff in their store, friends that would like our stuff, even if you know of any tshirt related websites that you haven't seen us on that would benefit us by being on. We have so much to offer you and you can be a part in the growth process with us. I'm just an email away ;)

-Joey

A Week Since

I can't believe it's been a week now since we left for Calgary...and now it's already over. I have one more big push to prepare for the Montreal show in less than a week. Then Dora and I are going move into our new apartment. And then we're going to crash...for like one day. And then get the ball rolling again.

As you may have read on the Hide Your Arms blog posted yesterday...Next month we'll be carrying hoodies.

Calgary Tattoo & Art Show

Here's a pic of our booth. The people of Calgary were very nice and seemed to really like our shirts.

















Cory From LA Ink! Dora has been talking about sending them shirts for the last 5 months. Finally when we saw them she did it!






















Kim from LA Ink! She is very pretty in real life.

















Hannah was the first one that I saw. It's so weird to see someone from TV 2 feet in front of you.

















Here are some photos of Downtown Calgary and a pic of the convention itself:

September Designs

So we're back! We made it safely to and from Calgary. I will post a bunch of photos of the show up tomorrow with a summary of the events that took place. But for now I'd like to talk about the new designs that I posted up today. We were previewing the designs in Calgary and people seemed very much to like them. So here we are:
This shirt is called Tokyo Massacre in reference to the Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies. I wanted to play around with the classic Friday the 13th Jason (Hockey mask killer) character and put it into the context of our ongoing morbid Japanese theme. No gore necessarily, I just wanted to create a bold black and white image which was readable and understandable. I even continued the image in the same scratchy style as our Death's Embrace design.






















For this one I called it Shukketsu which means bleeding in Japanese. I was originally going to make a striped pattern shirt but then i started bleeding the lines and making them look more like cuts. I've also added something which I thought was fun, a razor blade with Akumu Ink written on the inside instead of on the back of the shirt. As we have more and more fans as well as people continuously buying our tshirts and return buyers as well we'll continue to have fun creating a label which you'll be proud to own.























Next month we have a big surprise so don't forget to keep checking back