Or how I turned the traditional dish of my hometown into a source of passive income

Yes, I designed this t-shirt!

Back in 2016, I was spending some time in Japan, to e̶a̶t̶ ̶s̶u̶s̶h̶i̶ ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶s̶p̶e̶n̶d̶ ̶m̶o̶n̶e̶y̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶r̶e̶t̶r̶o̶g̶a̶m̶e̶s ̶do data collection for my Master Thesis. At the time I was looking to start some kind of side hustle, something small that I could have committed just a little amount of time during the weekends or at night. I was literally looking for ideas everywhere, failing miserably (with a few exceptions), until I noticed something that people in Japan, and myself, loved: gudetama, a cartoon character depicting a depressed egg.

Gudetama is quite popular in Japan and, as I discovered later, in other countries in South East Asia as well. The design it’s simple, and there are tons of variants of it. Additionally, the designs are sold on almost everything you can imagine: t-shirts, mugs, notebook, tote bag, and so on. The design of the character is fairly simple, it’s a humanized version of an egg. So I started to wonder, can I do something similar?

And what is it that we Italians can call home if not family and food?

At that point I just started to note down all the possible simple characters people may like, or buy. Salads, carrots, dogs, and so on. But is that really what I wanted? I needed something iconic, able to play with people emotions, something that will pop up specific feelings in viewers, something that recalls home. And that’s when I started to think about making a tribute to my hometown. And what is it that we Italians can call home if not family and food?

So I shifted my brainstorm around the most typical dish of my hometown, Verona: the Peara’.

Pearà (Veronese dialect term, literally “peppered”) is a traditional Veronese sauce made with bread crumbs, beef and hen stock, beef marrow and black pepper. It is served exclusively together with bollito misto, making Lesso e pearà (lesso is Venetian for bollito), a typical dish unique to Verona and its surroundings (Source: Wikipedia).

A dish of bollito misto with Pearà. (Credits instagram.com/giuliogabrieli)

The idea was to make something unique about it, on the style of Gudetama, but inspired by the tradition of my region. I wanted something easy, funny, a and iconic. After many trials and feedback from my friends, I ended up with this design:

My first attempt at making a sketch about bollito and pearà

With the design ready I now needed a way to sell it. At this point you have several possibilities. The first is that you produce the products, in my case t-shirts, yourself, anticipating the money and then hope to be able to sell everything, or rely on a print-on-demand service. In my case, I decided for the latter. After a bit of browsing (and testing) I decided to use Redbubble, an easy to use website that allows you to create your own print-on-demand store. You just have to upload a design, set up some parameters, and they even generate mockups for the products you may sell for you. I’ll show you an example:

A mockup of my product, generated by Redbubble

At that point, I had a design and a store ready to sell my first products. So i decided to just share the link on my social media, and surprisingly it worked! In just a few days I started to see the first conversions. I was kinda satisfied with the results, but obviously I needed something more. I therefore decided to make some additional design, and release them once in a while. Moreover, I created an account on Instagram so to reach out more people.

I know have several designs available, and I am able with little to no effort in sharing something on my social media once in a while, to earn something out this store. Moreover, as Redbubble does not ask you for money to post a product, as compared to other stores such as Etzy, you can post as many designs as you want. Additionally, I have also spent zero on my software, as all my designs are made using Inkscape and GIMP, the open source alternatives to Indesign and Photoshop respectively.

My store on Redbubble.

In this post I showed you how I took advantage of my hometown traditional dish to create a source of passive income online. If you decide to do it as well, my advice is to rely on free software, such as Inkscape, and services that do not charge you to upload your content, such as Redbubble. And if you do, don’t forget to share the link in here: I would love to see your designs.

If you read this post so far and you wanna learn more tips and tricks on how to start your online side business, follow me or leave a clap (or both). And if you have any comments let me know below. Have a great design session!

Do you know how to code? Check out my post on how I monetized my first Hello World in Firebase.