We're different
This story begins in 2009. We had just started out with Simon Cruz and we had a new management behind our backs. We were trying to figure out the best setup for our merchandise. While we were suggested several merch companies to handle this for us, I had a feeling I could run this business directly from our website instead. After all, I had sold various crap on Ebay for years, and I already had pretty solid shipping routines set up.
By coincidence, around this time I received a phone call from our previous A&R - Anders Johansson - from Universal Music. He had spotted my picture in an ad by D.N. (one of the biggest newspapers in Sweden), and clever as he is - he figured out that they didn't have the right to use my picture for ad purposes. He asked me "Should I give this a go? How much should we settle for?" We agreed on a modest amount and he said he was gonna make some phone calls.
He called me up later on the same day and said "It's settled". I got paid a few days later. I offered Anders 10% of the amount and after some persuasion he agreed.
I used this money to print CRASHDIET t-shirts, of course, and a few of these early prints we sell even to this day.
In the beginning our "shop" was a static web page with Paypal "Buy now"-buttons. This worked for a while, but over time it became too difficult to manage, especially when you're selling t-shirts, and you need to keep track of the stock - of every size. We needed a serious order system, and obviously a customer database too ;).
(Now we'll get a bit techical here...)
I looked around and I spent weeks playing around with osCommerce. This was a fantastic platform - truly free & open source - and fully customizable from the ground and up. Yes, I'm a computer geek if you haven't figured that out yet ;). However, I settled for Zen Cart instead, and in late 2009 our first real online store had its première.
I had so much fun with Zen Cart I can hardly describe it, and I still miss it to this day.
In January 2016 it was time for a change. I wanted to integrate the shop with the website we already had. So the shop became a part of www.crashdiet.org, and I migrated from Zen Cart to Joomla & Virtuemart. I still don't know if this was a clever move or not, but if you don't even dare to try... you'll just get stuck :). And Joomla certainly has its benefits, at least compared to everything else I've tried.
Since mid-2016 the shop has run on its own domain at www.dietrecords.org. The band was moving slow at this point (lack of singer) and me and Martin decided to start a record label, and it became Diet Records. We relased Martin's solo album as well as some (ex-) rarities with CRASHDIET. Then Gabriel Keyes came along all of a sudden...
Nowadays we're 100% focused on CRASHDIET, so Diet Records has become more or less just a portal for CRASHDIET. Maybe I'll move the shop back to www.crashdiet.org eventually, I don't know. But we're staying here for now :).
I closed the shop on December 31 2019 - we had some issues with malware infections / phishing redirects - I couldn't figure out where it came from so I had to start over. We opened the store again on January 31 on a fresh install and things have since then run fairly smooth! :D
/Peter London, CRASHDIET
Logos start here
