💛 A BRIEF HISTORY OF GATOSHOP

🐱 💭 I started making my own stickers and zines in 2006, at first just printed in paper at a local copy shop and cut and assembled by myself by hand. I created this webshop in 2013 (originally named Gatosaurio) to give them a place to be found online, and to have a label under which I could invite other artists to make stickers of their work too. I did everything myself, even coding the website in HTML.

In 2015 I relocated to Texas, where I started producing vinyl stickers, iron-on patches and screen printed apparel, all of which were made in the USA (and to this day I still use these same suppliers for stickers and patches as their quality is unmatched!) I continued to collaborate with guest artists to design stickers as well as apparel items, and also used to travel often to festivals in North America and Europe, distroing contemporary Mexican comics from my cartoonist friends back home. 

Gatosaurio kept growing organically until 2018, when I moved back to Mexico City and decided to take a break. This break took longer than expected because in 2019 I fractured my cervical spine and spent almost two years in recovery– an event that left me physically disabled with limited mobility ･*･｡✧ ♿️ ♡

Thankfully, in 2021 I was able to retake my life and reopen the shop ♡ In 2023, after 10 years of Gatosaurio, I felt like it was time to make some changes to this project and to let it keep growing... so I moved the webshop from my DIY HTML website to the Shopify platform and decided to change the name to GATOSHOP!

 

 

🐱 🙏 I am very grateful to be able to do what I love for a living– which is drawing, supporting other artists and sharing cool things with the world from my home! Special thanks to my husband Ramón Banda of EPIGONO. E.G.L. for his endless support (and for manually screen printing all of my apparel!) and also to my family and friends: Vanessa Peña, Gabriela Fraga, Marisol Verdugo, Berenice Medina, Alina Pérez Montes, Ginette Lapalme, John Porcellino, David Schilter, Teie, Zero and V.A.L.I.S., who I miss and remember dearly 🕯 And also thanks to YOU for being here!