tenacious-toys.blogspot.com is now Tenacious.Ninja

OK, Benny, now just what the hell is going on with the Tenacious Blog today? The domain changed? What's this Tenacious Ninja thing?

Glad you asked, thanks for noticing.

Lemme explain:
I've been building and writing this blog for about 5 years on the Blogger platform. It's free, so that's awesome, and there's a built-in communication between Blogger and Google search simply because it's a Google product. I love that.

When you first start a Blogger blog, you get to choose the beginning of the URL for your blog, but it'll always end with .blogspot.com unless you set up a "vanity" address using a domain you've purchased. Making that switch isn't hard, or expensive. SpankyStokes.com and ToysREvil.net are two examples of blogs you probably already read that have set up custom domains for their blogs a long time ago.

I sorta never did this... I'm not sure why. It didn't seem like a priority to me until I realized we have been blogging for 5 years and had over a million pageviews. Only then did it dawn on me that my blog's domain was wack... by that I mean, too long and cumbersome. tenacious-toys.blogspot.com ... man, that's a mouthful and really not a pretty URL to stick on a business card. Also, hard to remember offhand.

Thankfully, we have the Google, so this blog is very easy to find and comes up #1 on Google if you search "tenacious toys blog" so you can understand why I might have placed this whole custom domain concept on the backburner.

This year, however,  I've spent a lot of time setting up new domains, websites and social accounts for other people and companies. I started thinking about domains a bit more clearly this year. I also noticed in GoDaddy that they began to offer new "extensions" which are basically new endings that replace .com or .net or .info or those other more common endings.

Out of curiosity, I logged onto GoDaddy and searched for new, short domains with the word tenacious in them - I wanted to keep my Tenacious branding but establish a short, memorable URL which could be easily communicated. I found .club, .nyc, .today, .buzz, .reviews and all kinds of other ones I could use. But nothing seemed to fit...

... until I found .ninja.

Tenacious. Dot. Ninja.

I was actually laughing out loud at the absurdity of that idea, and bought it right away.

I mean, what the hell, GoDaddy? .ninja is STILL funny to me! Why the hell is there a .ninja?!

So my mind starts racing... maybe this blog could actually have it's OWN mascot! A ninja! And all of a sudden, it hit me: Tony Gil (Gilt Studios). Many of his custom toys are little ninjas! And they're awesome, simple and tight characters with personality, and they are fun. They were perfect:

So I reached out to Tony (who I've worked with in the past) and basically told him the whole story, and he was into the concept - his character as this blog's mascot. And Tony is a very talented sculptor and painter but I had one specific guy in mind to translate Tony's 3D character into a mascot, because he so expertly designed our pitbull logo for the Tenacious Toys store: Alex Rivera (Playful Gorilla).

Alex was all for it, and Tony was all for it, so I set the wheels in motion. What Alex came back with was a brilliant, cartoony reinterpretation of Tony's Handplant Ninja character - the Tenacious Ninja. It's fun, it's blue, it's badass, it's adorable... it's the perfect graffiti-writing, ass-kicking mascot for an art toy blog:

If you're looking for tight, colorful and super-professional mascot or logo development in this style, I highly recommend reaching out to Alex on his FB business page (or friend him on Facebook and message him there). He is available for commissioned work.

Look for much more Tenacious Ninja action on this blog in the future - we will be creating awesome Tenacious Ninja t-shirts, stickers, and using the artwork in promotional materials, and I believe Tony is planning on creating actual custom figures of this exact character. Obviously, we will be posting about all of that as it develops.

Thanks for reading the new Tenacious.Ninja blog! Hopefully now it'll be easy for you to remember our domain name....