It Was Supposed to Be Vodka

It started as a joke.
A fake brand, a tipsy-drunk idea. A play on those annoying businesses that butcher spelling to sound cool. We thought, what’s the craziest name we could get away with?

We landed on Klitzentitz.

Yes. Exactly.

Originally, it was going to be a vodka brand. I even looked into what it takes to make vodka, which (shocker) is a lot. I guess you can’t just slap a logo on a bottle of ethanol and call it a day. There’s legal stuff. Manufacturing stuff. Financial stuff. I don’t know. I stopped reading. It’s a lot of shit.

But I bought the domain, I am locked in now. And if you know me at all, you know that I am good at making long-term commitments with short-term enthusiasm.

The Plan Was Nothing

For a while, Klitzentitz was just a running joke between Vicky and me. We'd invent fake Klitzentitz sub-brands to solve problems we didn’t want to deal with.

Need cat boarding? Klitzentitz Cattery.
Hungry? Klitzentitz Bitz Trail Mix.

We had wild catchphrases and slogans ready:
Klitzentitz is for everyone.
You want to get your hands on our Klitzentitz.
Everyone wants to try our Klitzentitz.

But somewhere between the jokes, the domain, and the t-shirt designs, something shifted. I didn’t want to keep half-starting things. I’ve already started and abandoned enough stores, platforms, and half-written plans to know how this usually ends. I didn’t want to add Klitzentitz to the pile.

What This Is Now

This is a journal of sorts. Our story maybe. This is a record of trying to build something from nothing, but doing it where anyone can see it. I’m not here to teach you how to build a brand. I have no idea how to build a brand. This isn’t a how-to. It’s a try-and-write-about-it-if-I-don’t-quit-first.

Different steps forward, backward, sideways, I’ll try to capture it.
All the little missteps. Every WordPress/Meta/Google Analytics rage-click swear-a-thon.

I mean, have you ever tried to set up a Facebook Pixel? You start with a YouTube tutorial that’s already out of date, even though it was posted four days ago. You click where it says to click, but the menu’s already different. The dashboards are different. You end up three tabs deep in a section called “Events Manager,” next to something labeled “Aggregated Measurement,” and suddenly you need to call the bomb squad because shit’s about to blow up.

And don’t try to read Meta’s help articles. They’re already outdated while still in draft mode. At the bottom, there’s always that cheery little line: “Did this article help?”👍👎
No. No it did not. And could you add a middle finger emoji in there?

That’s the stuff I want to talk about. The abandoned drafts. The accidental breakthroughs. The part where everything that’s supposed to take five minutes somehow takes an hour and a half and a piece of your soul.

And I don’t want to talk about it because I think it is a winning strategy (“hey, look at how I failed”). I want to talk about it because the other option is to just let it die again. Quietly. Like it did the last time. Remember all the other times I said this might happen? No? That’s the point.

What The Hell Is Happening Next?

There’s no next step that I know of. I have no real Call To Action for you. I dunno - you can join the email newsletter if you’re down for it - but don’t look for a vision board. There’s no inspirational quote in a clean sans-serif font. Fuck it. I’m winging it.

This post exists because it happened. That’s it. Whatever comes next gets its own entry. Eventually. Maybe.

Want to see the dumpster fire in real time? Visit Klitzentitz.com

And keep visiting, because I am going to keep playing around with it until I figure it out.