Emma Louisa Dicks looks at the end of a creative era and the beginning of a new book adventure!
BY EMMA LOUISA DICKS
Wow. It’s been just over ten years since DIVA featured our card business in 2014.
Over the last ten years, my wife Sandy and I created and crafted our business, Slamsister Designs, providing the queer community with a range of products from greeting cards and pop art prints to mugs, coasters and vests.
From a card range of a dozen, we expanded to over 70, with wedding cards, valentines, get well soon, birthdays, anniversaries…the list is endless. We set our goals to expand onto the High Street and get to as many Prides as possible. From this adventure, our goal shifted – suddenly Slamsister wasn’t about greeting cards or knickers (they were bestsellers by the way!) but meeting people from our community.
As cheesy as this sounds, over the last ten years the lasting impact of this business has been friendship. And not just any old meet and greet, we are talking about long-lasting, lesbian friendships. The best kind. Because of Slamsister, we went on a massive charity walk over 13 days, an epic 177 miles, from Prestatyn to Chepstow – the Offa’s Dyke – and raised thousands for charity. Not bad going for two Gloucestershire girls!
Don’t get me wrong, it was the hardest challenge of our lives! But the team camaraderie and leadership resulted in knowing even more lesbians and making even more friends.
A few more lesbian festivals later Slamsister hit its stride. I think at our peak we had 70 designs, posters, prints, vests, briefs, mugs, coasters…we featured in DIVA, had slamstuff in shops, had posters in hotels, worked on a game idea with someone in the US – a ton of stuff.
So, a Slamsister tattoo, a 10th wedding anniversary, and a whole bunch of friends later – we can answer the question – was Slamsister worth it? With a resounding Yes.
We both work full time too, so getting on for nearly 10 years, I had less and less time to make new designs, print prices went up, and greeting cards fizzled out. My aspirations and dreams changed from art to writing. For five years I had been plotting and planning an epic lesbian sci-fi trilogy, a story I wanted to write since I was a little girl and a huge Star Trek geek.
In 2024, we self-published The Adventures Of A Lesbian Spaceship Captain: Book One on Amazon and followed it up at Christmas with a coffee table book to the series Messages From The Gay Way Solar System, volume one.
With a Slamsister Design on the cover, the book is the next step in our journey. Two more to write, and then? Well, who knows where Slamsister will need us next? For now, we will keep our website, slamsisterdesigns.com for nostalgia more than anything. We don’t sell much anymore online, and even though it costs to keep the website, we just can’t quite let it go, just yet…
The Adventures Of A Lesbian Spaceship Captain is available to buy on Amazon. Book one is available in all formats! Messages From The Gay Way Solar System is available in hardback! Find out more here: amazon.co.uk/dp/B0D6XF9M3N
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