Should I Make Some Uni Watch Belt Buckles?

You may have noticed that I’ve pretty much stopped doing merchandising projects. No more monthly T-shirts, no more monthly pins. That’s mainly because the same readers who used to support Uni Watch via merch purchases now do so by subscribing to my Substack and/or to Uni Watch Plus. And I’m totally fine with that — I’m a writer, so I’d rather have people buying my writing than buying, you know, stuff.

But I’m still open to doing fun merch projects, and here’s one I’ve been thinking about: I recently learned that there are companies out there that still make custom belt buckles — a product category that I mistakenly thought had died out a long time ago. Vintage sports buckles are cool, satisfying objects — they have a nice heft to them — and I know a few Uni Watch readers collect them (hi, Kevin!). So I thought it might be fun to make some Uni Watch buckles and offer them for sale.

Does the world need Uni Watch belt buckles? Nope. Do I need to sell more stuff? Also nope. The main reason for doing this would be for us to enjoy a fun creative project.

Here’s the catch: Unlike T-shirts and some other merch items, belt buckles can’t be made on demand, one at a time — you have to place a minimum order. It’s one thing for me to get stuck with a bunch of unsold pins, because those were fairly inexpensive to make, but the buckles are pricier to make. So before I go ahead with this, I need to know how many of you folks would be interested.

The details:

• The buckle design would be done by Todd Radom (who also designed all of our Uni Watch pins).
• The price would likely be in the $18.99-ish range, plus shipping. I’d probably ask you to pre-order before I put the project into production.
• The buckles would probably be ready to ship sometime in September.

Some of you may be thinking, “I can’t say how interested I’d be until I see the design!” Fair enough, but I can’t ask Todd to design something until I know whether the project is actually viable. Look, you know Uni Watch’s logo, colors, and so on, and you know Todd is an ace designer, so you can probably envision how the finished product might look.

If you like the sound of that, please shoot me a note. If enough people respond positively, Todd and I will get started. If there isn’t much interest, that’s fine — absolutely no pressure. Uni Watch will be fine either way! Thanks for your consideration.