For Dual Wield Studio’s 5th anniversary, we planned to do a full blog series covering the entire history of the company–from its inception to all the accomplishments our team has made thus far working on Tamora Pierce, Iron Widow, Among Us, and more.

The first and the second post went as planned. The third was meant to be about how Dual Wield Studio manifested and launched. Our CEO and co-founder Rowan Rowden sat down with the marketing team to tell that story.

Over the years, Rowan shared countless anecdotes over the years of the catalyzing experiences that resulted in forming Dual Wield Studio. They had worked jobs that treated them and their fellow staff atrociously. They spoke often of frustration with the state of the licensing industry and slapdash poorly-made merchandise dominating spaces where fan creators filled gaps with love and boundless creativity. Most profit-driven initiatives were all too eager to take advantage of artists on the rare occasion an IP elected to collaborate with fans. Artist Alley at any given convention felt far more authentic than anything available for sale in stores.

When Rowan and Adri founded Dual Wield Studio together, they aimed to find ways to bridge IP holders and fandoms to make things with heart, to champion working with artists and manufacturers centered on fair compensation and sustainable processes. They wanted to treat people right and make things that, frankly, didn’t suck.

They chose a name for the business that layered together teamwork and queerness with a reference sometimes used winkingly to refer to their bisexuality. It mattered that “Studio” in the company name was singular, not plural, because it’s still just the one business and location, not multiple.

In the excerpts of the audio and transcript shared here, Rowan speaks to some of this with Michael Moccio, our Vice President and Business Development Director. Only parts of that conversation were recorded, and the edit shared here is hardly remastered for pristine audio (there is background noise including typing from a participant’s keyboard & participant audio quality varies in volume and clarity), but it’s important to us to share. For folks who knew Rowan or may have never gotten to meet, it’s a brief window into her driven passion and generous heart. Dual Wield Studio exists as we do because of how Rowan shaped us.

You can listen to the interview excerpt here, and read the lightly-edited transcript below:

Interview transcript:

Rowan

I just, like, I know all of you, and I feel like I'm gonna throw up. I hate this. I truly– This is my least favorite thing to do. Not– not because of any of you guys or anything, it just, it —aaaaaaah!

Michael

(Laughs) Tell me about the time between then and, like what– I don't even know what you would consider the start date of DWS.

Rowan

I would consider the start date the day that we launched the store. So the day that the store went online. Basically from the day that I quit to the day that we launched the storefront. It was basically just work. 

I think the most interesting thing about that point of time is that that is where I got really into Pokémon Go. I was working remote because I didn't have to go to the office anymore and so I would work a lot from a coffee shop and that is where I made friends with so many different people – both through playing Pokémon Go and because there was a little group of us that all had the ability to work remote before the pandemic. And so we would just shoot the shit and work at this coffee and cupcake shop. 

So a lot of the initial parts of the business weren't necessarily shaped by those people because they didn't have any context with licensing merchandising and any of that, but it was a lot of having that office environment without having an office environment, right? Like I could complain about stuff that I was encountering while we were all having a drink and food, like the same way that you would have in an office environment even if they weren't all working together. I could run ideas past them as long as I stripped out a lot of the information that wasn't really relevant or interesting for them to know, but was a general like, “Hey, I have this person doing this and this person doing this, and I'm having trouble with this,” and because all of them also worked and were adults and we had that kind of really nice rapport where we all felt like coworkers. We did a lot of problem solving stuff together. Basically I would say it's what I wanted from a co-working space the few times that I looked at co-working spaces and was like, ugh this sucks ass, actually!

Michael

Mm-hmm.

So what were the things that you were doing during this period? Obviously getting the website infrastructure set up, but like, what about what's your initial stock, the license deals, PMC..? 

(editor note: PMC was our primary warehouse and fulfillment partner until their operations shut down earlier this year)

Rowan

So Adri handled a lot of the art stuff because Adri can do art and I cannot. Adri was handling a lot of the getting artists. So like the Shibari Hands pin was somebody that Adri knew, a lot of the pins in general were either folks that Adri knew or Alice came up with one of the initial starting pin designs back in the Sanshee days. Way back then.

So Adri handled a lot of the art stuff. I handled a lot of the admin right, so like going to the Secretary of State and signing up for all of the different paperwork and stuff, setting up the bank account, setting up the separate bank accounts so that we had multiple avenues for funding in case one bank account got shut down or frozen, or PayPal did something, which PayPal loves to do. Any of the kind of rough infrastructure, so like where– again so much of this has changed, right? But like where do contracts live? When we're doing contracts, where do we go for that? So I found Heather Morado, who was our first lawyer for interviewing a bunch of different lawyers in the area. Spoke to Tamora Pierce. Tamora Pierce was one of the first licenses that we set up. 

We did a couple conventions in between, which is where we really started speaking with Brian over at YSBRYD and staffed their booth a couple of times to kind of help out and get a sense for the fans and things. When we came back, we did the plush as one of the first projects that started funding us, and then we used part of that money to go ahead and do the first launch for the Tamora Pierce line, and then our original stuff, which was the 2 bags were the main flagship items that we launched with, and maybe the coffin ita bag…? I don't remember which one came first. I'd have to look at the sales report, but we used YSBRYD to basically fund a lot of the really fun extra projects that we wanted to do that we weren't sure would do super super well until we had sales numbers. 

I would say a lot of contracts, like a lot of going down to the offices of Heather and talking with her about what we wanted. A lot of useless meetings with banks where if you don't have collateral, they're not going to give you anything so they tell you to go away. 

Yeah, It's not interesting, that's the worst part. Is like that period of time is the least interesting because all it is is paperwork. It's getting Secretary of State set up, It's getting the Wanderers mailbox service set up because they can't use your apartment, and if you don't have a house, you can't sign up for a lot of the business stuff. You have to have a separate address that acts as that receiving facility, which is why we have Wanderers. If it's not a house because Seattle is bad. So yeah, it was so much admin work it was countless amounts of just paperwork, filings and checking with this person to make sure that this thing was filed in this different state. Not very exciting, unfortunately.

Michael

Was there ever a moment between when you left Sanshee and when the storefront went live that you were like, “Oh no, I've made a grave mistake. There's no way that this is going to work”?

Rowan

Nope! I don't think there's ever been… The only time that I have ever been like, oh, I don’t– this is not going to work, It was in the context of I'm so tired and I don't want to do this anymore. 

I feel like it sounds gross and arrogant, but merchandise makes money. I've always known that is just, not easy money, but, to some extent, that is easy money. It's when you look at the shit that's put out, it's like, oh, I can do that! It's not that hard. I can find a T-shirt manufacturer. I can put a fuckin 45° tilted Crewmate on a T-shirt. I can do that. That's all you're doing! And the moment that I realized that a person with no art skills could do the vast majority of the artwork that was out in mass market. I was like, oh, no, we're fine!

Michael

So there was nothing in between Sanshee, you leaving Sanshee, and you starting DWS? There was a story like that – which honestly, good for you! I'm very happy that was your experience with that.

Rowan

Same! The only other thing that I did in that period of time was I got the job with the jeweler because I really wanted to know– again, I knew that merchandise makes money and jewelry is one thing that nobody is really strong in. Everybody that does jewelry with the exception of like RockLove and a couple other specialty places, they do it overseas and it's usually like not good metals and it's not real stones and it's not the best quality, so it'll tarnish really quickly and all that good stuff. So I took a temp job working part-time with a lady who did high-end fashion jewelry so that I could learn how that process worked and then make sure that we added jewelry and that's part of why we have jewelry for Tamora Pierce now is because I did that part-time job for about 6 months.

Michael

So you got a part time job to specifically learn– 

Rowan

Yes! How to do jewelry.

Michael

Wild! In like the best way, I think that's a great example of how you do things differently versus others, I think just taking the easy way out. Or doing what everybody else does, or just trying to muddle their way through it.

Rowan

Yeah, I had no idea how to do it and it was, I mean, $20.00 an hour to learn how to do all of this stuff was not great, but the experience and the contacts and the ability to make a bunch of jewelry stuff, I think, is the real value there.

Michael

Why do you think you do this different, above-and-beyond approach compared to anybody else looking to do merchandise? They're just going to do the lowest common denominator, easiest, not the most ethical, versus I'm going to get a job part-time with a jeweler to specifically learn how to do this so I can do it right, I can do it well, and I can do it the best I possibly can?

Rowan

I mean, frankly because I can't manage people who do that stuff if I don't know how it works. I can't have proper expectations. I can't understand what is and isn't possible. I don't know where to source things. I can't give accurate quotations. To do my job and to do it actually with some passing measure of, you know, well, I have to know how it works and so I love learning things. If I could just go back to school and not have to worry about tests or wasting money or anything like that, I would just be permanently in school. I just. I love learning things. 

The cool thing I think about learning is that things that aren’t even related to what you actually want to learn about you learn in the process of it. So like when I was doing jewelry, I learned about, you know, sourcing. I learned about which – it's not as interesting, I guess – but like, you know places have stones that they source. I learned so much about what ethical sourcing looks like because no one in that industry gives a shit. 

So when I started asking questions about, like, “Okay, this guy has diamonds for $1.20 a pop, where is he getting the diamonds from?” Like, where, what, how does that process work? And learning that oh, nobody in the industry knows that. The most baffling thing I learned about the fine art section of jewelry is that, A, nobody cares where it comes from, they just want the thing and B, no one can track it or trace it. Like there's just. There's just like this black pit of fine jewelry where a lot of folks operate in this super gray area of– Yeah, I'm not. I'm not getting on the tangent. Insane! People in jewelry are insane. 

The reason that I got the job and the reason that I do a lot of the things that I do is because if I don't know how to do something, then I need to be able to at least have a passing understanding of how that works so that I'm not making it hard for the person who actually needs to do that job. My job should be to help them, not to make their life actively hell or more difficult.

Michael

Pivoting slightly in your write-up. You talked about the fact that you were really angry at how many of your friends were treated within the industry. Comic companies running Kickstarters for items they could fund, underpaying the folks who were associated with it, merch companies, stealing artwork and fan art from our friends. Do you have any examples of friends that went through that specifically that you got really angry about?

Rowan

I don't want to call out specifics, but I would call out more examples of initiatives that are in the industry, right. So when we were at Sanshee, we talked with Hot Topic, and Hot Topic’s pitch then, as it was now, was, “Oh our program with artists is so great! We have two programs, one where we–” and imagine this being pitched as the best because they're talking to other business owners, so in their mind this is the best because it is taking advantage of several levels of people and you're making so much money off of it. So they're pitching it and they're like, “Oh, yeah, so we have people do spec work, right? So like, we get an artist and then we tell them that if they want to do designs for this thing that they really like, you know, they have to do 10 of them and then you get 10 designs and you only have to pay for one!” And like they were so proud of it! And it was just the most evil bullshit that I've ever heard in my fucking life!

 And then, they go, “And if that wasn't cool enough, dog, we got you. We have this artist alley program where we go and find artists and and they get–” I think It's not 10%, I think it's like 1 to 3% net sales of of it and they're like, “--and they get that! And then we donate like a half a percent to a non-profit or something,” and It's just the most heinous behavior, and every single company that we talked to, especially because we had Five Nights at Freddy's at that time – at Sanshee, anyway – every single person we talked to was just monstrous. 

Then we ran into the same thing with Innersloth. Every single person heard me say, “We want to work with artists, we want to work with creators. We're really passionate about this,” and took it to mean, “yeah, dog, we have the best ways to take advantage of artists and make sure that you never have to spend money and you make all of the money off of their work,” and it's just the most evil bullshit I've ever heard.

Michael

That definitely doesn't sound great. And this was during your time at Sanshee?

Rowan

Yeah, but then also anything, anytime I reached out to mass market stuff about Tamora Pierce things–  like it was less for that because a lot of people were just like, who? But I encountered it constantly with Among Us.

Michael

Gotcha. Tell me about the day that you launched to the storefront.

Rowan

It went really well. I was actually terrified it was going to be really bad and stressful and terrible. No, it was perfect, everything went well. 

I wouldn't say we treated it like a Kickstarter, but kind of did. We basically had a list of people that we either worked with or knew or were friends with or whatever. We basically made this list and we sent out an e-mail to everybody on that list and said, “Hey, we have a new thing that's opening. We would love for you to take a look when it opens!” So we did a soft launch to basically test the waters, make sure that if someone bought something, did it work? Does it work? Is everything okay? Does the fulfillment center work, is everything on that end okay? Are the orders getting fulfilled, are the customer service emails– I have a big, long, horrible checklist of all of the things that in my anxious mind I could think of that would go wrong and then just checked them off as we did our soft launch. And then once the soft launch was done, we launched it properly and that went super well because the soft launch went well and it was the least stressful I think it could have been.

Michael

Between the soft launch and the actual launch, what was the time frame like?

Rowan

I would have to look at Twitter, but it was less than a week.

Michael

Less than a week. Okay, so for –

Rowan

I think! I think. We should check the Twitter on that. Don't quote me on that! 

Michael

That's fine. It's enough context that it wasn't a long period of time. For the soft launch, who were the folks that you reached out to? Was it like, Heather, PMC, and the folks that you built relationships with along the way of developing DWS and more?

Rowan

It was some of that, I would say it's a lot more fandom friends because we did frankly, an ungodly number of conventions. I just had a ton of convention friends. Like my follower accounts are whatever, right? But like my Twitter became the main source of everything when I was doing it, everybody had Twitter. Everybody was on Twitter. It's how we organized all of our meetings and things and how we met with people. 

The vast majority, I would say, were people like us. It was folks who we knew would shop there and less –  I think I would have to double-check who was on the invite list because I think we did invite, like, lawyers and people we were just generally associated with, like, “Hey, we launched this thing. This is what we asked you about paperwork for!” But the vast majority of them were just friends online. Fandom friends that I had made. If we go back and look at who the original handful of purchases were on that first day, I would know a lot of those names.

Michael

Gotcha. And then for the actual launch day, I want you to literally take me through what you remember of that day like you woke up–

Rowan

Absolutely nothing, because we launched it and did nothing. Like, I sat on my computer and I watched orders come in and I talked with PMC and I didn't do anything. Because nothing went wrong! It was literally just me sitting on a computer being like, I'm waiting for things to go wrong. Nothing has gone wrong.

Michael

When in the day did you launch the store?

Rowan

Probably 11, I would say.

Michael

And were you just like, on your couch?

Rowan

Yeah, just on my couch, I went, probably got a cupcake. Again, I don't remember exactly what happened that day. I can't look at my Twitter because I delete my Twitter. But yeah, no, I didn't do anything different. I think I probably got a nice dinner? It was a very unnotable day because nothing went wrong.

Michael

And you were on the phone with PMC during?

Rowan

I wasn't on the phone. It was just a lot of emails back and forth. So there were minor things that had gone wrong, like I remember somebody message and been like, “Hey, you forgot a period at the end of this sentence.” So I had to to go, “hey, does it fuck anything up if I change this on the back end of the website?” One of the confirmation e-mail things didn't work right, but it was usually something was like, oh, I had to check this box or oh, I have to update this verbiage or something like that.

Michael

Gotcha.

Rowan

Shopify makes things remarkably easy for what it does.

Michael

Can you talk to me about how you set up your relationship with PMC and like how that came about?

Rowan

Oh yeah. I knew I didn't want to build it on my own because I had other things that I needed to do and fulfillment takes so much time and it is a specific skill set to know how to organize things, where to organize them, what sort of boxes you need to get to optimize your your shipments out to save money– There's just an entire skill set and knowledge base that I did not possess in the same way with jewelry. And unlike jewelry, I had no desire to possess that forbidden knowledge. I would much rather pay someone to know that for me. 

So I did a bunch of tours of a bunch of different places. We talked to– I'd have to look at the full list, but basically any fulfillment center that would handle officially licensed gear in small quantities, we talked to. Then a couple of them we talked to that were big and might have handled it, we talked to as well. I came to all of them with basically a list of about probably 10-15 questions and of those 10-15 questions I would say 2 or 3 of them are most important. 

An instant mark off of the roster, like just an instant disqualification, was they would not allow me to talk to staff. They could give me whatever pitch they wanted, they could walk me through whatever they wanted, but if they did not let me talk to the staff, I told them I won't work with you if you will not let me talk to your lowest paid person and ask them how this job is then I won't work with you and I don't think anybody – similar to when I talk to people, I say I don't actually care about money, I care about these things specifically, and they go, “Yeah, okay,” and don't think that I'm being serious. None of these people thought that I was serious. So when they wouldn't let me do it, I was like, cool. That was it. Like, Do Not Pass Go, Do Not Collect $200. I would leave the meeting kindly, obviously. 

But there were two very specific meetings at fulfillment centers where I was like, great! And as I mentioned in my e-mail multiple times, I would like to speak to one of your staff members. It could be a janitor, it could be your part-time temporary workers, you know, whatever the case may be. I wanna talk to them. And then when they didn't. I was like, great, you knew that was one of my provisions for working with you, you knew that was my provisions for doing any business with you. This meeting is concluded. Thank you so much for your time, I wish you the best of luck, and then left. 

When I got to PMC, I did that whole thing over again. The difference here was that I already knew people who worked there and at that time, they had nothing but glowing things to say about PMC. A lot of the boxes that I had on that list were: Do they have health insurance? How are part-time staffers treated? Generally with holidays, especially with fulfillment centers, how are the holiday fulfillment staff treated because you're going to be backfilling and hiring a bunch of temporary people and those people need to be treated just as well as your normal staff. They were the only company at that time that did everything that I wanted. They let me talk to the staff, they let me tour the facility. They let me talk to the lowest paid person, they had health insurance for all of their folks. They reassured me that they do all of these things that I found very, very important that nobody else does. And so it made it a very easy decision to make.

I like knowing the people that I work with. And not just like knowing them in a business sense, but I like genuinely knowing them as people. 

I think so much of doing business isn't about how much money can you make another person, it's how well do you know this person? And in the workplace too, right? Like that's why I want to have those one-on-ones with people. That's why I– you know, I'm giving up the one-on-ones, but I'm making it a lunch instead. You need to know people because the more that you know people, the better and more effective you are at your job because you will know how to handle people in different situations, you will know what works and what doesn't work, because you'll have all this historical context of oh, I know this person likes this and so I want to make sure that I assign them this. 

Michael

When you started DWS it was just you and Adri. At what point do you, number one, make the call and decision, “I need more people,” and what did that initial round of hiring look like? Talk to me about the moments of, “Okay, this is too big of a job for one person, I need to build out a team.”

Rowan

We did the Licensing Expo virtual because it was during peak pandemic. And we thought that we were going to get a license. Trying to be non-specific here. We thought we were gonna license and we did a bunch of prep to see if we're going that license and I contacted two folks who I knew and had not worked with in the past, but like hung out with in the past and had a good sense for like, I could work with these people. 

I would say I just hit a point where it was like I don't want to be working all the time. 

Like truly, I just. I hit a point where I was like, I'm actually really, really tired. And I– there's physically no way for me to do all this work that needs to be done, it's just not. Again, there was never any–even at my lowest moment where I thought that there was a chance I would have to close the business–there was not a concern about. It was partially about money, but it was more about like, I don't have the time, space, and energy to do the things that I need to do that I know will work to get there. Because you just need people to do it. 

I would say the real moment was when we thought that we were going to get business because it was more real at that point, right. I wanted to make sure that we were trying to set ourselves up as much as possible for that moment when something was going to hit because we had enough things, we had enough feathers in our cap, we had enough interest, I guess, in us at that point in time that I was like, okay, something is going to happen. So I need to start that process sooner rather than later. 

So it was a couple part-time folks at first because the other part of this that I think is really important is that no free happened at Dual Wield. Duel Wield would have been faster and easier to set up had we taken any of the copious amounts of free labor that our friends offered. And it wasn't because I didn't trust my friends or I didn't want to work with those people or anything like that, it was simply that if you can't operate your business without taking advantage of people, it shouldn't exist. You should close down. You're bad at your job, you are a bad business person. Doesn't matter how much money you've made. It doesn't matter how much money you made for other people. If your business exists and can only exist off of the work of other people that you are horrendously underpaying and poorly treating, you're bad at your job and you shouldn't have a business. And so when I was doing Dual Wield, that was the mentality that I had.

If I can't pay people, then I shouldn't be in business. And it should be me until I can get to a point where I can pay people. So when we started hiring was when we can afford to pay people.

 

(end of interview transcript)

2025 marks Dual Wield Studio's seventh anniversary. The company has grown and evolved since then, but the heart of what we do remains centered on fans, fandom, and striving toward the change we want to see in our industry.

We’re grateful for all the kindness and support (and unhinged keymashes) that have gotten us here, and hope to share all that and more as we look ahead at the future.

(Rowan, we promise we’re gonna keep striving toward treating people right and making things that don’t suck.)