The Blog’s the Thing for DramaGoodies.com
Angela Mitchell always loved theater. She performed all sorts of roles over the years, learning firsthand about the different forms of anguish suffered not only by actors but others in that world as well.
A few years ago, Mitchell, a former publicist and editor at Texas Computing magazine in Dallas thought she’d try her hand at capturing these feelings on t-shirts, gifts and home goods, created on CafePress.com. Her venue to sell those items to theater pros and fans is http://www.dramagoodies.com.
“I created our shop simply because I’d thought of slogans or ideas that made us laugh, or that saluted our favorite shows, movies and more in a respectful way,” says Mitchell. “I also wanted to give a little moral support, and have some fun with the hardships of life in the theatre, whether onstage or backstage.
“Nobody was doing this so I thought I’d give it a try,” she says of the shirts with sayings such as “Upstage me at your own risk” and “Exits, pursued by a bear.”
Mitchell started by coming up with the slogans to be used on site’s products. Last November that she got the site going in earnest, which she expects to clear less than $100,00 in revenue this year.
After leaving Texas Computing, Mitchell briefly went to Seattle but eventually settled in Jacksonville, FL, where DramaGoodies.com and her company Paranoid Public Relations and Creative are headquartered.
For right now, Mitchell is promoting the site through her own firm and on MySpace. She’s also using her blog http://paranoidcreative.blogspot.com and other blogs like technorati.com, where she hopes to find the like-minded, both for new creative ideas as well as customers.
Next year, she’s thinking of promoting her site through the Backstage newspaper and Web sites of regional theater organizations.
Will she ever make DramaGoodies.com a full time job? It’s getting close, at least time-wise.
“I work [on the site] 20 to 30 hours a week but that includes weekends,” she says.
