Guys!

We couldn’t possibly be more excited to take this new step in our journey as unhinged K-Pop fans turned unserious serious businesswomen! Today, September 15th 2023, our brand new online MIA2K-Pop shop is OPEN to the public! This of course did not happen overnight, so let’s talk about how we got here.

Making merch without knowing it was merch

In a past life (just a few years ago), Kathy had an Etsy shop and was big into crafting all kinds of things, including shirt requests for bachelorettes and things of the sort. Her crafting came to a halt around 2019 when she ramped up plans to move from Miami to London, and that was pretty much all she wrote with the heavy crafting days. She took up embroidery and a much more leisure/special occasion approach to crafting, and that was that.

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Meanwhile, Laura has traditionally enjoyed designing and making all kinds of clothing items for herself, and her crafting ramped up for friends and family in the past few years.

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When we started going to concerts together, Laura was always excited at the prospect of making a shirt or item to commemorate the event, and Kathy went along with it because it made Laura happy and it also made for very cute pictures.

We got the idea from Pinterest to make ourselves “Now Playing” shirts for the BTS PTD in LA concert night 1. We bought the shirts at Ross and then Laura used her Cricut to design and make the artwork. Laura’s song choice was Airplane Pt. 2 and Kathy’s was Baepsae/Silver Spoon. Impeccable taste.

After a few months of podcasting and networking, Laura kept finding opportunities to keep designing more and more things. And then one day we did a little photoshoot at her place with all the other shirts she had made us. One for Stray Kids, one with the “my name is” label for our BTS biases (Jin & SUGA), and a really funny and punny design she made us for the Bad Bunny concert, where she took BT21’s Cooky and had him pull his eyes from under with his pinkies, like Bad Bunny does. She turned him into Bad Cooky.

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Since then, we have toyed with the idea of making merch, but it takes a lot of time to design items, choose materials/manufacturers, do all the SEO work, promotion, etc. It also costs money to set up shops and add items, and it also basically means we’re actually doing business. So we started our LLC, opened a joint business bank account, and then we were finally free to start our merch journey.

What to expect from MIA2K Merch

For us personally as adult K-Pop fans, we like subtlety in our K-Pop merch so that we can wear it without thinking too much about reactions that could come about at family or work gatherings. We’re also being conscious to stay away from too much group-specific merch or items that use the likeness and name of artists because 1. there’s quite a bit of that already and 2. we don’t want any sort of legal issues coming our way.

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With that in mind, let us show you what we DO have in store, literally.

Hangul U.S. City Pride Shirts

One day I was trying to write Miami in Hangul in a sheet of paper, and next thing we knew, that became our first merch item. Laura used Art Deco colors in the design (that just so happen to match some from our branding) and we made the shirt available as a regular crewneck as well as a crop top.

Miami Hangul Graphic T-Shirt (find the crop top version here)

And of course, as much as Miami is at the heart of everything we do (we are MIA2K after all), we know we’re not the only city in need of representation. So we also made shirts for Atlanta (regular | crop), Chicago (regular | crop), Los Angeles (regular | crop), New York City (regular | crop), Orlando (regular | crop), and Tampa (regular | crop). If you’d like us to make a design for your city, let us know and we’re happy to survey the market and see if it’s a viable option for us to launch!

K-Pop Multi Stan Bucket Hat

If you’ve seen any of our content, we’re pretty sure one of the first things that jumps out is that we’re bonafide multistans and follow lots of different K-Pop groups. We’re not about the fanwar life and we think there’s room for every hardworking and talented group or artist in our hearts. And we also LOVE a bucket hat. So, we present our K-Pop “Multi” bucket hat so you can also publicly share your stance.

Limited Design Runs (Sept-Oct 23)

Keeping seasonality in mind, we also will be running limited designs that K-Pop fans everywhere can enjoy and bring out when the reason for the season calls for it.

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Because we’re currently in #HispanicHeritageMonth, we made available an ADORABLE tote that perfectly displays what MIA2K is all about: the intersection of cultures in Miami. This is where K-Pop meets Latin stans, and boba tea meets coladas (a strong Cuban-bred style of coffee that you take only 1 small shot of, or else you’ll be WIRED for days). And because we’re all about the mantra life and positive reinforcement, this tote is here (again, for a limited time) to remind you that you’re BREW-tiful.

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The most wonderful time of the year is ALMOST here. No, not Christmas. We’re talking about Halloween! And so we bring you the CUTEST, subtlest, and flat out best design we can think of: the Korean finger heart, zombified. That’s right. You’ve watched Train to Busan and every other gory movie and K-Drama that ends up with a zombie situation, but you haven’t watched it while wearing this pocket t-shirt. We recommend you get it soon, because again, limited seasonal run. Oh, and it comes in four colorways!

And that’s all she wrote (er, designed) for now.

Just kidding. If you believed that, you haven’t met Laura. There are a TON of designs already done and even more in the works. We basically have the whole year planned out already.

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This is a super exciting chapter for us, to be able to create items that people can potentially love and wear out to K-Pop events (or non-fandom related events too, since that’s the point with our subtle approach). This also creates an opportunity for us to have a small income so that we can continue investing our time and resources into bringing the podcast to life and grow as much as possible.

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With that, stay tuned for the next seasonal drop and again, please tell us what items you’d like to see us produce!