Naramu Designs

side brand · naramu.store

visit naramu.store

01, Why it started

I’d just moved into a new apartment and wanted to decorate my room. I went looking for posters online and came up short, nothing stood out, nothing felt like it was made with any real point of view. Then it hit me: I’m a designer. Why am I shopping for this instead of making it?

So I made my own. A friend saw them and asked if I was selling them. I said no, I didn’t think anyone would actually want to buy these. He was adamant: yes, they would. I took his word for it. A year later, I’d crossed 280 sales.

The first poster that inspired everything else.

02, The black-and-white run

03, THE COLOR SHIFT

After designing them in black and white, I wanted to do something with the color red. With Chainsaw Man, I wanted chaos and color.

04, What a store teaches you about people

I didn’t really know how to deal directly with customers, I kind of assumed everything would just work out. It didn’t. Shipping delays, posters bent in transit, people ordering the wrong size: so much of it was stuff I couldn’t have predicted. It taught me patience, and how to actually understand someone’s problem instead of brushing past it.

I never dismissed anyone, because I’d been in their shoes. I took the time to actually solve what was wrong, and some people just wanted to talk about anime, I loved that part. I think the reason I held a 5-star rating wasn’t some system I built, it was that I never treated them like numbers on a page. They were people who shared my love for anime and manga.

Somewhere out there, one of my designs is framed on someone’s wall, just sitting there waiting to start a conversation. That’s the part that makes me happy.

05, The number

280+ sales in the first year, off a batch of designs I almost didn’t list.

OBJECT · SIDE BRAND

object

side brand

store

naramu.store

posters

33 and counting