💿 ARCHIVE

  • I started GATOSHOP as Gatosaurio in January 2013. It was a DIY webshop I made in HTML in my MacBook laptop, from the one room apartment I lived in by myself in Mexico City. I picked the name because it was already my email and it sounded cool– in Spanish! In English it sounds a bit weird... Cat... saurus...


    This is the true story of my online shop, accompanied by real screen shots of its previous iterations... let me take you traveling back in time online with me! 🕸💻⏳☕️(⁠･⁠ω⁠･⁠)⁠つ⁠⊂⁠(⁠-⁠ω⁠-⁠)💭

  • I've been obssesed with cartoons and stickers my whole life, and in 2006 I started making zines with my comics and stickers of my own designs (printing them at a local copy shop and cutting them myself with scissors). Before opening Gatosaurio, I had another online shop that I managed for Café con Leche, a collective I was part of, where I started selling my stuff and also inviting more artists to create sticker designs for it. I really liked having this separate project where I could support and share the work of other artists I liked, so when I left Café con Leche in late 2012, I kept the online shop and artist sticker label, an reopened it as Gatosaurio!

  • After two intense year of work (drawing, vending at festivals, making packages and cutting thousands of stickers) I cleared my stock at the end of 2015 and moved to Texas in the USA... a bad decision (for many reasons) but one that allowed my business to grow more than ever! I continued to collaborate with other artists, started producing my stickers in the USA, now with local manufacturers who used high quality vinyl to be laser cut (so no more cutting for me hehe) and I also started designing apparel, which was wonderfully screen printed in Ohio. The rest of my time and energy I dedicated to making comics... I pretty much did not have a life outside of work... but there wasn't much else for me to do anyway! XD

  • I wasn't just super productive in the studio but also outside– I travelled often to alternative comic festivals in North America and Europe, with my own comics and merch plus the Mexican distro comics I've always loved to showcase... but none of that could distract me from the fact that my life in Texas was falling apart.


    In 2018 I left the USA for good and returned to Mexico City. I was deeply depressed due to various things I was going through, including having just left an abusive relationship. My depression was so bad that I entered a psychotic state in which I hallucinated all sorts of horrible things and ended up jumping from a 2nd floor trying to escape from all of them– no I wasn't trying to hurt myself, I seriously thought I was going to make it... and I did. But it sucked. It sucked so bad...

  • After almost 2 years in recovery from fracturing my cervical spine, I made it to the other side and started living life independently again, now as someone who is physically disabled with limited mobility 🌀♿️💙 I finally reopened the shop in March 2023, and thankfully my family, friends, fans and clients were all very supportive with the return of Gatosaurio <3

    During my recovery period, all my things were stored away, so I came back with a renewed sense of appreciation for objects... as much as they can be a burden, not having any of your own leaves you with an emptiness that feels like you're not fully yourself. Your things, even the most seemingly pointless trinkets are not useless– they serve the purpose of holding of making your life sweeter! Because when you acquire and collect things intentionally, they become meaningful. For me, having a store is a way of sharing that kind of material enjoyment with other people ✧｡･*･

  • In 2022 I decided to bring the eye hats back, my most popular design ever (mostly because I needed to pay rent XD) and I also started drawing again... not yet returning to the demanding grind of comics but slowly designing new stickers and apparel– the later now printed by my then boyfriend, and actual husband Epigono <3

    I also needed an assistant for some of the weekly shop tasks, and my friend Valis (a talented musician and cartoonist in her own right) was the one to help me all throughout that first year... may she rest in peace 🕯

  • I've always liked to include fun gifts with orders, and also putting together surprise grab bags with cool trinkets– and everyone always asked me to sell these things by themselves! So in 2022 I finally gave in and started doing that... I hadn't before because I didn't want to get into the logistics of shipping random little things (since my shop had always included shipping in the item prices) but once I figured out it wasn't so complicated, I went full on into hunting mode for more new and vintage treasures for the shop (✧ω✧) ...Pretty soon I had so many products, including my own as well as the distro stuff from other Mexican artists, that updating the site became too much work! And I'm not about that life anymore...

  • 2023 would be the turning point for Gatosaurio. After 10 years, it had both outgrown itself and transformed so much that I felt like it needed a radical change. So I moved my online shop from a DIY HTML website to Shopify and renamed it GATOSHOP! And that's it ...Well, it did take me months to learn how to use the platform and countless intense coding hours to get it to do what I wanted... and I'm still tweaking stuff around every now and then– but part of the fun about websites and shops is that they're constantly changing... just like you and me!

    I'm so happy to be doing this for a living and have many plans for the future of GATOSHOP that I hope you like... Thank you for being here! (⌒▽⌒)♡ 〜Inechi