2025 Year in Review
Hello and happy December to you; I’m Zara Varin, President and Creative Director of Dual Wield Studio. As 2025 winds down and our team prepares to enjoy our winter holiday break, we’ve taken some time to reflect on how this year has been. I’d like to share a rundown of some of what our team has fielded over the past twelve months.
2025 started with our team navigating sudden, awful grief with the loss of our Co-founder and CEO Rowan Rowden (link content warning: death, suicide). The first months of the year were, for me, some of the hardest I’ve gone through. I went from being the person focused on art and product design to having to figure out how to run a company I was suddenly leading; Rowan entrusted not just the company in majority to me, but also all of their personal affairs, too. Mourning the dear friend who became my boss while also trying to figure out the tedious bureaucracy on both personal and professional fronts is still something I’m learning. It hasn’t been fun, or easy, but I have to try.
That said, I’m someone who copes with action and, vitally, didn’t have to do it alone; none of us did. Our team took it slow the first few months of the year to mourn, figuring out how to be gentle with ourselves in our grief while shaping what we needed to keep working. Crucially, we were put in touch with the folks at Banister Advisors, who stepped in with care and consideration to give our team counseling and resources to help with our grief and what came next. They met us where we were, but didn’t leave us there.
Just as our team was returning to working regular hours, we got the news in early March that our primary warehouse and fulfillment partner was closing with very short notice and a short timeline for us to find someplace new. We quickly shifted our product launch and development plans while searching; due to the closure of the previous warehouse, we had to rapidly complete the final launches of our collection for Alanna’s 40th Anniversary before the end of our licensing agreement with Tamora Pierce and the beloved Tortall universe. Many of us, as lifelong fans of her books, were sad for the license agreement’s end but are so proud of the work we were able to do for a series that has meant so very much to us.
Happily, we found our new warehouse and fulfillment partners in the lovely folks at CRWN Studios. We had to temporarily close our online storefront while moving everything to the new warehouse, but by September we were happy to reopen. Some of the first items out the door were our initial wave of pre-orders from our Dragon Age: The Veilguard collection, and there's more on the way.
We launched the Sacred Blood Capsule Collection in collaboration with Kevin Jay Stanton, who has been nothing short of a joy and a privilege to work with.
We refreshed the launch of the adorable Mochi Town plush line, which features much-needed cute, cuddly comfort in the form of soft plush and sweet characters.
For Dragon Age Day in December, we invited our fellow fans’ input in a survey to help inform the future of items we develop for the series (and the survey is still open at the time of posting, so do please share your opinions!).
Speaking of Dragon Age and future plans….
Throughout the year, we continued our work with Innersloth on mass-market officially-licensed Among Us products around the world, and send love to Fangamer for featuring some of our past work for the previous Among Us online shop. This area of our business is the thing we’ve shown the least in this space, but is in some ways the most far-reaching. In our partnership with Innersloth, we continue to champion products that challenge the status quo of the licensing industry wherever we can; we’ve begun adding artist credit to tags (a standard practice for our own storefront items that’s all-too-rare in mass market products), prioritize consideration for design over a slapped-on asset, and scrutinize every last space bean to find the Impostors. We’re happy to continue working with Innersloth into the new year to do more tasks together!
In tandem with all of that, the state of the world has certainly had its ups and downs. For the sake of brevity, I’ll reiterate a few key things that matter to us (a non-binary & neurodivergent-led majority-queer company):
- Intersectional inclusivity; diversity and equity are vital.
- Trans rights, reproductive rights, and access to food, shelter, and medical care all continue to be human rights.
- No human is illegal.
- Knowing your rights, no matter where you are, is important.
- We do not support the use of unethical generative AI. Pay artists, not data centers.
- Free Palestine. Free Congo. Free Sudan.
So, y’know, it’s been a hell of a year.
I hope for all the things going sideways, we can continue to support each other and celebrate the things that go well. We’re closing out this year with cautious optimism for what 2026 has in store, and I hope – for all of us – it is far kinder. Thank you for your care with us through this difficult year, and also for reading through my pages-long essay (I’ll post something at least twice as long on AO3 to make up for it soon).
See you in 2026!
