Libertas Bella

Libertas Bella, which roughly translates to “Liberty is Beautiful”, was an e-commerce website offering, you guessed it, pro-liberty merchandise. It launched in early 2020 during the COVID madness and was shut down in the summer of 2025.

It originally drew inspiration from artists like Quint, Banksy, and Shepard Fairey of OBEY, along with 1980s punk rock art i.e. early Black Flag and Sex Pistols.

After spending so much time in Bali, I wanted my own creative visual outlet that suited my team’s skills. I saw an opportunity with a print-on-demand business model utilizing Shopify and Printify. Low overhead and scalable, it seemed like a great way to scratch that creative itch.

Gross profit ran at about 31%. And yet our net profit was, at best, break even and, more likely, it was negative. Ultimately the brand ate up a little over $140k in cash before I decided to call it quits. It turned out to be an expensive itch to scratch.

While it was open, Libertas Bella handled approx. 2,645 orders. Our most popular product was this “1984 Was Not Supposed To Be An Instruction Manual” shirt.

As a digital business, Libertas Bella didn’t work for a variety of reasons: There wasn’t enough generic, organic search volume for our key head terms. We spent approximately $25k and yet we also couldn’t get paid traffic to work. And our original distribution channel didn’t work as planned/hoped.

We found out the hard way that print-on-demand was, and still is, a crowded space without a deep, strategic moat. Customers bought once or twice from us and then never came back. We built a 6,000+ email list that regularly opened our emails and enjoyed our content – but didn’t consistently purchase more merch from us.

My business partner, Alex, and I tried partnerships with philosophically-aligned publishers to help them monetize their audiences. That drove sales. But those sales ultimately weren’t very profitable once we paid for the product to be printed and shipped and paid the publisher their cut.

Looking back, I think you need a brand, one likely built around a personality, which people already love which you can then monetize with your own merch, not the other way around. We didn’t have top-of-funnel distribution when we started and we were never able to get it at scale and profitably.

Now with the advent of AI and the ability to make your designs and print whatever you’d like, on-demand and on so many different products, Libertas Bella became a business which wasn’t going to find product-market fit and take off.

Plus, my life has changed immensely in the 4 years since Libertas Bella launched. I’m now married and have two beautiful daughters. I have other interests. It was time for Libertas Bella to be retired so that I could focus on my family and other interests.