The creative journey has been full steam this year. I have been working with Sketch83 on Piece of Laredo, our homage to Laredo, Texas. This brand was inspired in January 2023 while I was out of town shopping at Buccee's. I noticed how proud people were to be at the gasoline station and were calling loved ones in Monterrey to see if they wanted a tee shirt from here. I thought we needed some shirts for Laredo to capture the culture, landmarks, dichos y mas! Sketch and I were on the phone that night to talk through the idea and I also bought the domain PieceofLaredo.com and got to work on this. During the creation of the brand (which was a journey in itself) we opened up Zeno Design Company, a branding agency to help provide services for the public. This sidetracked us a bit from the launch Piece of Laredo. Eventually, we worked through the setup of the business and got to launch our first Piece of Laredo tee in August 1st, 2023. We are now 14 tee shirts in with our latest one focusing on the love for cafecito and conchas in our culture.
One thing I realized from actively working on 2 ideas (Piece of Laredo and Zeno) at the same time is that you can't chase 2 rabbits. You have to go after one to be able to catch whatever it is you're trying to catch. In this case, Piece of Laredo, is our passion project that led to this journey and we decided to hold off on Zeno Design work to focus on this. We are also diving heavily into what I feel we do best, branding, personal branding.
Through Zeno we were able to meet Cesar Gutierrez aka Mr Mamalonskis when he took off in the real estate world as he created real estate walk-throughs of homes. He called them Casas Mamalonas and has a bunch of phrases that connect with people in the hispanic culture. His "jaina", Tanya, reached out to us via Zeno Design and we got the ball rolling on this in March 2024. We were able to "brand" him and created a website with products as well (www.mamalonskis.com). We both hit it off with Cesar and a spin off of this relationship was the creation of Spicy Talkos Podcast. This is a podcast were Cesar and I talk about everyday topics as we eat tacos and select 3 salsas for every episode. We are on episode 11 as of this blog post. I leveraged my past podcast-production and video production experience to get the ball rolling on this. The podcast is evolving it's personality and I'm excited to see where it goes! All we can do is show up, eat tacos, share our thoughts, record, produce, publish. The rest is for the public.
On top of all this, I continued The Switch Podcast journey with Eric Castillo and we're at 226 episodes as of this blog post. This podcast was created in 2018 as a spin off to my original The Happy Oscar Show. The podcast still includes the original interviews I did for the Happy Oscar Show along with these 226 episodes where our aim is to "Switch" your perspective on life. This podcast has been a journey in itself for me personally. I've had so many lessons on what to do with an idea, how to remain patient, how to not fix was not broken, etc.
Finally, this website. It's been in the works since last October. The blog section of it is my favorite as it dates back to 2013 posts when I started my creative journey (publicly). I have been creating since High School early 2000s... but really got into creating sellable products as well as sharing my perspective with "the world" through daily illustrations.
We are here now.
Keep up with the projects: www.PieceofLaredo.com/tees, The Switch (all Podcast platforms), Spicy Talkos (Youtube, Spotify, Facebook), my work (here on this site).
Stay Happy.