After 10 years (2004 – 2013), the time has come for me to put MutantMall.com to rest… and to move the store to my main domain, CarlKingdom Shop. The old domain name will continue to function, and simply forward to the new.
All orders already placed on MutantMall.com will be fulfilled, and until I de-activate it.
The reason behind the change is pretty simple. It seems silly to me to maintain and promote multiple names and sites. I liked the name CarlKingdom (as suggested by Zeke Piestrup at my wedding) because everything I did could be contained in it. As I get older, I don’t have the energy to waste going in multiple directions, so there. I’m still working on moving the Shopify page to an official subdomain, but that will happen in a few days.
A little history: I actually bought the MutantMall.com domain in 2001, and intended for it to be a vast online library of products I endorsed and considered to be “mutant.” A non-profit thing, and maybe some Amazon Affiliate links. It was inspired by The Happy Mutant Handbook. It went through a lot of experimental changes through the years, and became a functioning store in 2004 — in preparation for the release of Sir Millard Mulch / How To Sell… in 2005. So for the first year, I sold a few weird T-shirts printed by my friend Chris Sittel. That was fun. But the site really took off and became profitable in mid-2005 when Web of Mimicry dropped (and I mean “didn’t do anything with”) the Mulch record, which meant I decided to start selling it myself. When I moved out to Los Angeles and stopped releasing new music, business slowed down quite a bit. I kept the site running, paid the fees, carried mountains of CD boxes with me everywhere I moved to all these years, etc. Occasionally Martin Pursley and I would do new things with it (usually when I had a new Carl King product). Since my wife and friends and I have to ship the orders out ourselves all these years, we sometimes run into delays and backordered items. Some months when there is nothing new happening, the store loses money. On average, it continues to make a small profit on an annual basis, so we can afford to keep it going and sell these weird things that some people like.
So: thanks to everyone all over the world who has supported the store over the years!
Now go buy something from The CarlKingdom.com Store so we can test it!
-Carl.