Passion Projects
Trove
Trove was a wild idea I had back around 2014, for a clothing inventory service. The premise was that most women have more clothing than they can keep track of, and it would be useful to have an easy way for them to see it all & build outfits visually and easily.
The whole thing started with the Stylebook app (which is still around). If you had good, clear photos of your clothing items with the background removed, you could have a blast importing them into the app and quickly building outfits. It took a minute to properly remove the backgrounds, though. That’s when I realized that you could use a combination of Photoshop and—wait for it—actual mannequins to get the effect you needed, to build a really clean look. (You need a mannequin or dress form in order to create the right layering effect for coats and accessories like bags or scarves.)
I spent months on this project. I went all over the city in search of the perfect mannequins. I schlepped the butchered remains of used mannequins back from the garment district in DTLA in 90 degree heat. I even met with the manager of a mannequin factory at a warehouse outside of LA, because I was considering having custom designs built. I spent hours on Photoshop. I was in talks with a company in India to outsource that side of it, because it was so tedious and time consuming. I bought a lighting kit and set up a studio in my apartment. I inventoried my entire wardrobe. I built a Squarespace website with a rotating header (I used all my own clothing as examples) and designed business cards.
It was really, really fun, and I was really passionate about it until the scope of what would be necessary to pull it off truly hit me. But I’m super proud of how far I took it, and what I learned.
Rainy Day Templates
Rainy Day Templates was a blog design shop I built and ran for a few years back in 2009. I had absolutely no formal schooling in coding or graphic design, but I figured out how to hack the back end HTML of Blogger enough so that you could customize pretty much any aspect of it. From there I invested in Adobe Illustrator, and just started playing around. Eventually I even hired a friend of a friend—a professional graphic designer—to come over to my house and teach me the things I couldn’t figure out myself. I learned how to write some very basic HTML & CSS to fill in the gaps, and before I knew it, I had a bonafide business model.
I spent all my time conceiving and building new layouts, all based on the basic Blogger templates. It always started with some color combination I wanted to explore, or maybe a font or background pattern. I built a shop with tutorials, features, and a built-in purchasing system—all on Blogger. There were all kinds of eCommerce options I could have used, but I was familiar with and comfortable with Blogger. Plus, the more I played with the platform myself, the better I got at being able to solve other coding issues to be able to do what clients wanted.
Rainy Day was my whole world for a while. I would spend entire days utterly absorbed in it. My ex-husband would bring me a cup of tea and I’d suddenly realize I hadn’t eaten anything all day. (Talk about missing signs of autistic hyperfocus.) I was so super proud of waking up each day to see what orders had come in. I worked so hard to build out the purchase process as simplified and clear as possible. I provided tons of tutorials so people could continue to customize their blogs themselves and offered lifetime (lol) support & background hosting (Photobucket FTW). I had pattern libraries, FAQs, even buttons you could put in your sidebar to support my shop.
Some of the templates I designed for personal blogs, photography blogs, wedding websites, and even a simple Blogger-based shop (all SUPER dated, but cut me some slack—it was 2009):
Actual blogs I built for people:
Some of the earliest versions of my shop & my own personal blog, Elliequent:
