We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Kristy Li a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Kristy, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today So, naming is such a challenge. How did you come up with the name of your brand?

Our business name is EXP Gained. EXP is an abbreviation for ‘experience’, which means our full business name can be read as Experience Gained! In short, we chose the name EXP Gained because our small business offers art born from all our personal experiences gained while resonating and inspiring others to cherish their own experiences.

Growing up with video game classics such as Pokemon, Zelda, Final Fantasy, and more. We enjoyed viewing life like a video game where daily challenges were opportunities for us to level up and gain experiences. From completing daily tedious chores to hiking mountains, we saw every opportunity as experience gained to improve our mental and physical strengths. Prior to starting our business, we took this gamified perspective of life and started a slice-of-life online web comic called EXP Gained. We wanted to poke fun at the challenges we faced and bring joy to others who also faced the same speed bumps in life. After completing 100 episodes of our webcomic, we decided to pivot into products with the same concept.

Just like how our webcomic addressed the obstacles in life with humor, we wanted our art to also ease challenges in life in a physical product form. Our first product was a small red health potion pin as a reminder to keep going. At the time of starting of our business, we were also actively hiking and travel hiking. Inspired by nature and our unique experiences at national parks, the name EXP Gained resonated as an encompassing name for outdoor inspired art as well. EXP Gained was no longer about my own experiences, but was now applicable as a celebration of everyone’s unique experiences!

What the brand name represents today:
Our core belief that everyone’s experiences and adventures should be celebrated hasn’t changed since that first red potion pin was designed. We want our brand to remind everyone that it’s not just about the big events in life but even the most routine and seemingly dull experiences we gain contributes to how vibrantly unique each one of us are! With every year we continue running our shop, we gain new experiences and get to share them back in the form of our wearable art! Today our work features a range of original potion pin designs (luck, love, creativity, and more!), full national park collection (63 designs) and much more.

One of the greatest joys of running our business is hearing stories about all different kinds of adventures from customers. Stories about unique national park experiences to stories about challenges they may be going through and why a potion pin may be the extra luck they need to get through it! To see the spark of joy flickering through a customer’s eyes when retelling a story of their experience is always an extra boost of justification to keep our shop open.

We continue to run under the name EXP Gained to recognize and honor everyone’s adventure through life. We hope our art continues to remind everyone to celebrate all moments of life and can’t wait to see where our own EXP Gained will take us!

Kristy, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?

EXP Gained was conceptualized from the idea that life is an adventure and our experiences define who we are. EXP is an abbreviation for ‘experience’ and experience gained is inspired by the video game concept of the hero’s journey of gaining experience to level up which we find applicable to everyday life. We built the brand and created art to celebrate the experiences of others (heroes/customers we meet along our own art journey). Although the brand is based on a nerdy concept, we felt these concepts are applicable towards everyday life as well since everyone has goals they are striving towards everyday whether they be menial tasks to large milestones.

Kristy (Kli) is the artist behind the brand who started in 2019, right before the pandemic. EXP Gained originally started as a silly webtoon comic that poked fun at everyday life challenges. She shifted to creating enamel pins when she created her first design, a red ‘health’ potion pin as a small reminder to keep going when times get tough. She’s been drawing ever since she was little and pursued Fine Arts in college, but she never found a medium she was comfortable working with until she started designing enamel pins. The design parameters of enamel pins prevented her from overthinking designs and color palettes, which has helped her immensely with finalizing designs.

To live by our business name, our favorite way to celebrate everyone’s unique life adventure is by running a Side Quest at in-person events. A side quest typically consists of a small scavenger hunt with collaborating vendors or visual points of interests and is completely free for participants. What’s unique about our side quests is that they are never promoted and will change at every pop up event. It’s up to passing attendees to ask about the side quest and participate! Those who complete side quests are rewarded with a small gift! It’s just a fun way for us to celebrate an accomplishment with anyone who is brave enough and willing to take time out of their day to go on an adventure and gain a little extra experience out of life.

Our greatest accomplishments include completing our national park pin collection (63 designs) and now have multiple stores carrying a variety of these pins throughout the U.S. We’re proud to continue running our shop since it’s inception 5 years ago.

What’s worked well for you in terms of a source for new clients?

The best source of new clients for us has been in-person pop-up events. The experience of seeing the products in person along with our table/booth decorated to really give a full experience of our brand can’t compare to visiting us online.

How’d you think through whether to sell directly on your own site or through a platform like Amazon, Etsy, Cratejoy, etc.

We sell on a variety of e-commerce channels, mainly our website and Etsy. Since our brand consists of two types of audiences (indoor-centric fantasy gaming and outdoor-centric hiking and travel) it’s interesting to see how each channel best attracts each audience. The majority of our sales are from Etsy for our outdoor customers while our indoor fantasy gaming customers typically will find us through our online shop. Etsy undeniably brings in a lot of organic traffic who would never have found our brand, but their fees are much higher than our own expgained.com website. Because of Etsy’s high traffic, we allow Etsy to run on it’s own (we don’t do ads or any promotion of the shop). Instead the majority of our efforts are focused on driving traffic to our online shop since it’s traffic is highly dependent on how well our social media performs which requires a lot of energy to keep up with consistently posting (even once a day!). Our online shop also serves well for returning customers.

In addition to our online shop and Etsy, we have also tried TikTok Seller and found a bump of success when it was first launched. However, after about a year, we decided to refocus our attention to our online shop.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.expgained.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/expgained/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@exp.gained
• Other: Tiktok: https://tiktok.com/expgained

Image Credits

All images owned by EXP Gained.