New blog category, because you're worth it.

What is TPOP? Who is it, what is it, eh?

It's a team of people with lots of hands printing, folding, packaging textiles and accessories, and lots of fingers typing on keyboards and answering your countless questions about the medium.
Every now and then, we also write a blog post, like this.
We wouldn't have the incredible opportunity to do all this without YOU.

Yes, you, who are behind your computer, you who launch your brand using our services.

To thank you, we have decided to open a new blog section called "Portraits of designers", an opportunity for us to honour you by presenting your shop and your brand to ALL THE INTERNET.

To inaugurate this section, we thought it only natural to introduce you to two great creators who are doing great work and are having great success.

This is one of the very first shops to have decided to use our application, they are young, they are beautiful and they smell of warm sand, they are nice, they are talented: we present you Mersea Mersea.

Mersea Mersea

First of all, can you tell us about yourselves?

We are Elsa and Zacharie, a couple who love the ocean. Our story together starts underwater in the Philippines in 2015. Elsa had left a job in real estate to become a dive guide. Zacharie, a diver since the age of 9, had been teaching diving in a club in the Philippines for a few years. Our first meeting: it was during a dive in the Philippine Sea off the small island of Panglao. Since then we dive together, we travel together and today we work together!

Tell us about the history of Mersea Mersea. When was your brand born? Why did it happen?

Mersea Mersea was born during a discussion in a pool in Bali at the end of 2018. After travelling and diving together for 3 years we thought it was time for us to create something that would suit us and allow us to support our nomadic needs!

Just before that we had taken a digital marketing course on the advice of a friend, where we learned the basics of creating a website on Shopify. We had beautiful underwater photos and above all a passion to share, so we had this idea of selling t-shirts with our underwater photos and slogans inspired by the ocean. But we wanted this project to have meaning, to correspond to our values and not just to sell t-shirts, so we looked for a partner and service providers who were on the same wavelength. We launched the site in January 2019 and since the beginning of the adventure we have been collaborating with Coralive.org to whom we donate part of our profits to fund coral reef restoration projects.

Who imagines your designs? Explain us the creative stage of your work.

It's both of us! So our first designs, like the whale shark and manta shadow designs for example, come from Zacharie's underwater photographs, while the slogans "the life of my sea" or "sea queen" come from Elsa's imagination.

We are not trained as graphic designers so we had a lot to learn and we are still learning every day. We made our first designs with Illustrator but recently we invested in an iPad to draw the next designs with the Procreate application.

What form of company did you choose to start your shop and why? Are you still under the same status today?

We started the business under the micro-entrepreneur scheme which allowed us to test the model but we are currently thinking of changing to a company.

Why did you choose the Print on Demand model?

It is a model that is perfectly suited to our nomadic lifestyle as all we need is a computer and an Login internet to be able to work. During 2019 thanks to Print on Demand we were able to manage our business remotely from Indonesia and then from Australia.

You have chosen to work with TPOP: how did you hear about us? Why did you choose to work with us?

Indeed, if the Print On Demand model appealed to us immediately, we now had to find a service provider and there was no question of us choosing just anyone! The first condition for us was to find a French service provider who prints and ships from France.

It was while searching for a French POD supplier that we found TPOP among the applications on our e-commerce platform.

So we contacted TPOP and as we talked to them, all the planets aligned: the quality of the products offered, the labels, the plastic-free packaging, everything matched us, but above all what we liked was that we could talk to a real person (and a nice one at that). In short, the feeling was there and the adventure began with TPOP, who has been by our side since the very beginning!

Today, are you satisfied with your debut? How would you assess your experience?

We are very satisfied with this first year of existence. After a while we felt the need to go back to France, to the Basque Country, to be able to make more easily and quickly orders samples and make more pictures of our products. We have had nothing but positive feedback from our customers regarding the quality of the products and the same goes for the shipping.

What are your plans? What are your prospects for development?

We have great plans for Mersea Mersea, new designs, collab's and we are also thinking about new products. We know today that discussions are still possible with the TPOP team, so that opens up some great perspectives. To conclude, the future is... bright!

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This concludes this first article...

We would really like to thank Elsa and Zacharie for their trust and availability.

Their success is well deserved: managing to combine passion and work is far from easy, but when it works it is great.

We wish them much success and millions of planted corals!