My Work is Fucking Amazing. I Just Don’t Have 400K Followers.

There are pieces on my site that have been sitting there for months, some even for years, completely ignored. They’re all limited editions or one-of-one, and took me years of honing my practice and skills to even produce in the first place. The kind of pieces I believe with every fiber are good and worthy.

And then a random Gen-Z-er with a following the size of a small country touted a shirt that looked similar to one of mine but was done so poorly it made my skin crawl.

It went viral and sold out almost immediately.

Like I said, I make good work. Not “I hope it’s good.” I know it is, the same way you know your own handwriting. It took me a long time to stop needing anyone’s permission to believe that about myself, but it still doesn’t really matter until someone with way more followers than me decides it’s allowed to.

And that’s not a confidence problem, either. I show up, I make the things, I do the unglamorous, un-photogenic work of running a business that takes your whole being to sustain. Hell, I’ve spent years in nearly every modality you can think of untangling my trauma around visibility and worthiness.

The sales still won’t come until a stranger with a blue checkmark and forty times my reach looks at it and tells her people: this one’s okay to like now.

We call that the algorithm, but it’s a group of people I’ve never met deciding what I make is real and good and worth the price, and I don’t get a say in it.

Here’s my actual stake in it, because pretending I’m above wanting reach would be its own kind of lie: if one of those influencers decided tomorrow that Double Kick was cool, my life would completely change, and at an alarming speed. (If you see me crying tears of joy in the Trader Joe's parking lot, you’ll know why.) I’m not writing this from some enlightened distance—I want in. I just also think the system is rigged. And I’m allowed to want in and think it’s rigged at the same time. Most people aren’t honest enough to hold both.

What actually gets me isn’t the unfairness, or even the unavoidable fact that the internet is an enormous place, and there are millions of artists and makers and writers that make good and worthy work. I am by no means an anomaly. It’s watching something real, made with actual hands, sit ignored for months, and then the second it gets anointed, everyone acts like they always knew. Nobody says, “Huh, I was wrong to ignore that for two years.” They say, “I’ve always loved this,” and mean it, because the memory rewrites itself that fast. It’s honestly kind of a miracle of self-deception.

So I make the work regardless. That’s the only thing I can do. Nobody with a massive following cosigns any of it, and it’s still better than a lot of what’s out there. I’ll take my chances on my pieces finding the right people.

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Sara
Founder & Creative Director, Double Kick

PS: All the pieces shown in this article are available at double-kick.co.