If you asked me today what my most popular designs are, I would say Bones, Critters, Classification: Jackalope, maybe even the Rays. People talk about these designs a lot. Ask for and anticipate restocks. They write comments on my videos that make me smile. But only one of those designs ranks among the top five bestsellers of all time on my shop.

In 2024, I posted a TikTok video that went viral. 3.3 Million views. It’s still my highest watched video. I started the video saying, “Please don’t hate me,” maybe that was why so many people stayed. There were fights in the comments and for the first time, I received hate in droves. I also received an incredible amount of support. When I woke up the morning after I posted the video, I had hundreds of orders.

In the three years since I had started VesperTwine, I had never received so many orders in a single day and had never had a rush of this size outside a Black Friday sale. I felt like the wind had been completely knocked out of me. I was speechless, lying in bed, scrolling through an endless number of order notifications and still more came in as I struggled to reach the bottom.

The video was of me printing one of the very first Dragon’s Moon t-shirts. It was my first large design (now a staple on VesperTwine, but then a new horizon). It was double the size of any other design I had made and wouldn’t fit into my small hand press. In the video, I let people know that this shirt, because of the size and how difficult it was to print, would cost $5 more than the other shirts on my shop.

For the rest of the day, orders flooded in. It felt unreal. My partner and I ran errands and did chores around the house and tried to ground ourselves in reality while we watched the, frankly ludicrous, number of orders come in. By the end of the day, I had 400 Dragon’s Moon t-shirt orders that I needed to fulfill in two weeks. Two weeks to print more shirts than were usually ordered within 6 months on my shop. It was daunting but also the most successful and exhilarating I had ever felt since VesperTwine began.

VesperTwine was becoming a full-time job. Orders continued coming in for the rest of the week. My partner helped me get organized, to sort through the physical mess of over 500 orders and the emotional mess of needing to fulfill them all on such short notice. It was physically demanding work. Because I couldn’t use my printing press for this block, I had to print every shirt by hand. I laid them on the ground and put a block of solid wood on top and walked across it. After, I’d press all the edges with my fingers and knuckles. When my back started to ache and my fingers and feet were sore, my partner took over.

We had to extend the expected delivery date. Try as we did, we could not print 500 shirts in 14 days. We sent countless emails. Everyone was incredibly kind. I had been avoiding the internet for a while because of the hate, but seeing that support and kindness ping into my inbox was uplifting. It encouraged me to take a leap, to invest in VesperTwine like I never had before. I bought a printing press. An industrial thing double my weight and a lot more than I could carry alone. But the size meant that it could print the massive Dragon’s Moon block easily.

My partner and I cleared out our guest room and gave it to VesperTwine. The business had outgrown the space it had originally. It now took up almost half our house and it stayed that way until we moved. This video, this design, had completely changed the foundation of VesperTwine. It expanded my community on social media to new people and gave me a platform I had never had before. It let me invest back into VesperTwine and make it easier for me to continue doing what I loved.

With the new press, we finished printing the shirts we had left in record time. I won’t lie and say that this experience was solely positive. I had several breakdowns and struggled to manage college, VesperTwine, and my personal life. I didn’t really have a personal life, to be completely honest. All in all, it was hard. One of the most stressful times of my life. I also wouldn’t change a single thing.

The Dragon’s Moon design altered the entire trajectory of VesperTwine, the people that saw me online, and the types of things that I make. The Dragon’s Moon design was something I was truly proud of, that I felt called to do. If you look at my shop today, almost a third of the designs are dragons. Now, with every product drop, I make a new dragon design. Partly because I love dragons and partly because it feels like I’m paying homage to the design that, in part, made VesperTwine what it is.

It took me a long time to feel deserving of the love I got from that artwork, and to be honest I am still in awe at the amount of people interested in wearing my designs, but I have never felt more grateful. When I think about VesperTwine today, it feels different but it’s also incredibly similar.

Of the current popular designs I mentioned at the beginning, only the Bones ranks in the top five of my bestsellers. And it’s not even number one. That place, from that fateful day in July of 2024 until now, is held by Dragon’s Moon.