About Us / What We Do
All my life I've loved history and old things. I was born in Jacksonville, left as a kid in 1967 and finally made it back in 2010, ending up in Saint Augustine (since 2015). Being in Saint Augustine has sparked a particular interest in the history of the place where I live, with the benefit of easy walks to historical sites, lots of old imagery about the place, and the writings and wisdom of others with similar interests.
More recently, I discovered how many old maps and other historical images (truly art) are out there, ready for our enjoyment. So I decided to make them more easily found and acquired by others with my same interests. I already had experience building two other Shopify sites, one being the Sheep Dreamzzz site for the baby blankets we trained women in Nicaragua to make (they keep ALL of the profits - it's part of our 501c3 called Sheep Not Goats).
I began the site with a natural focus on Saint Augustine, with some items relating to the state of Florida in general. I plan to add area by area - Amelia/Fernandina, Florida Keys, and so on. Our offerings are great for a personal home, but owning a rental property across from where we live in Uptown Saint Augustine, I also envision a great fit for rental properties in order to give guests a bit more local flare of a historical nature. Most of the Saint Augustine items on this site are already hanging in our home or rental property.
What's Different Here?
Very good question, after all any one of our images might be found on a volume selling site like Zazzle in 50 different sizes. So here's where we shine:
- We're choosing the best of the best images and making them better. We clean up extraneous marks, and while we don't want to lose the appearance of age (mostly the "yellowing" of a document), if it's too extreme we tone it down a bit to ensure you can see all of the detail in your piece. Sometimes there's damage from folds, tears, etc. and we can clean that up.
- Everything we sell is ready-to-hang. We don't offer something at a lower price and then try to upsell you during checkout.
- Our pricing is good. We haven't built in much profit for ourselves yet since we are just getting started.
- We try to include historical information about the piece or about what is depicted. You won't find that on Zazzle. We're also crafting our own unique items, like our mugs featuring historical Florida stamps.
- We give you a link to the original piece so you can compare with what we sell. We don't try to fool you into thinking these are rare pieces that we own and have scanned ourselves. Due to age, all of this is in the public domain. We're simply making it easier for you to enjoy them in physical (vs. online) form and doing some necessary cleanup along the way.
I'm enjoying the research, the reading, the walks out to try to find old sites and compare them with what is there today (it's more difficult than one might think), and the addition of a new angle to my shop design work. I hope you find it interesting as well.