Netherworld Post Office Blog

Evil Supply Co. launched on Halloween 2012, with the behind-the-scenes work beginning more than a decade prior. It was designed to encapsulate my art, design, and writing projects into a singular focus.

It closed for a variety of business and personal reasons — including a traffic accident, a decline in the subscription box industry, and personal overwork — but never a lack of interest or passion or drive.

A combination of luck, networking, hard work, and brutal persistence have allowed me to rebuild — again.

Over the years I have lost count how many times things have gone to the stones, turned to rubble, picked back up, and rebuilt into something new. This is the harsh reality of small business, though there is significant solace in seeing each successive project being exponentially stronger than the previous.

I changed the name from “Evil Supply Co.” to “Netherworld Post Office” to close the chapters of those adventures, bring closure to the past, and give a firmer platform to build upon.

And to end confusion.

For the entirety of Evil Supply Co.’s existence, I struggled with folks expecting us to be more horror-centric than we were or to be based on true crime. A company refresh is the perfect opportunity to re-align expectations.

The coming years will see a refresh of stories, artwork, projects freely available, products for sale, rambles… etc. In the rebuilding, rebrand, I put everything on the workshop tables for review.

Evil Supply Co. experimented with so much — temporary tattoos, color changing cereal spoons, software, web domain and site hosting, umbrellas, music — while primarily being a stationery company. The core products were greeting cards and original stories.

Experimenting was possible (it felt necessary, it probably wasn’t) because the company was the starting point for external business projects, collaborations, and partnerships. As part of the shift, I have closed out all of these to focus purely on Netherworld Post Office.

I foolishly thought, as I began, “I can launch this in a few months. I’ll take a year! That’s plenty of time!”

But then I looked at the hustle build grind build sacrifice build up crush crash build again culture that consumed my life and everyone I was working with: “I do not want to live like that any longer.”

I took on a handful of freelance projects to raise cash then closed the accounts after the projects wrapped.

Extracting myself from these external projects and obligations, from this old life, while building the new company, and not sacrificing every waking moment to work, took about three years to start, and will take another year or two to fully flesh out.

Or more. That’s fine too.

I have enjoyed the journey thus far tremendously. I admit I have regularly felt stressed about the speed of progress, though as that regret fades, it feels like the ache after a particularly great workout. It is part of the process.

Thank you for joining me in the gloom.

Atticus Q. Redghost
April 13, 2023