I have in my hands, the first design for the range of Big Bear Rescue t-shirts (designed by my buddy Henbo who you can find here) that will be launching soon - I'm hoping the end of September will see this go live but I have my work cut out on that front. This week, I have a store to build and eco-shirts to source and probably a whole ton of other things that I haven't even thought about yet but now the design is in (and man, is it ever great) everything can progress at a speed only dictated to by how much sleep I need.

I'll preview it here next week when I'm happy with the end result. I probably need to do things to it that mean it can't be stolen too. Things like load up bad-ass occult symbols in invisible layers in Photoshop.

That ought to do it.

I figured we needed a decent logo as we go forwards as well, so I came up with this:

...so that's two things done this week. Two steps in the right direction and now I need to start piecing them together to make sense to the world.

This week, the story is about Maya. Maya is a dancing bear. That means she would have been stolen from her mother as a tiny cub. Then she was tortured until she learned to perform a pitiful hop that looks as if she’s dancing.

When they’re little cubs, dancing bears like Maya have their paws burned repeatedly to make them hop in time to music. But the audience don’t see this part of the deal. They don’t see the traumatised, frightened animal, controlled by the pain of a cruel ring that's been drilled through her muzzle. Being as words are sometimes too easy to walk away from, here:

In my own inimitable sales rep kind of way, you either give a damn or you don't. Giving a damn means doing something about it - in this case throwing some money into the pot here. Not giving a damn means moving right along the bus and pretending I never said anything. Makes no difference to me, but to the bear - and she is just one of many - it means a lot.