THE BLOG

News about Held Gear, new product releases, and more.

  • AI Bots and the Security State of Mind

    AI Bots and the Security State of Mind

    Thanks to the proliferation of smarter and smarter bots, it is now necessary to require all customers of HeldGear.com to pass through an email verification at least once before having the option to submit a payment.

    If you’re curious, put in a search for “fake orders in ecommerce” and you’ll see what it’s all about. In short, it’s mostly artificially intelligent bots exploiting marketplace checkouts to test credit card numbers. It bogs down resources, potentially flags my store as a fraudulent site, and is flatly annoying managing all those failed orders.

    Frankly, it would behoove WooCommerce to produce the option to require user email verification within their stock build. I haven’t made a successful plugin with Claude yet to do so and the options out there aren’t great. Ironic using AI to fight AI but that’s how it is too.

    This is how most ECommerce operates now, like our Etsy store, they require it. On DePop, they always make you verify your email. And they all deploy CloudFlare or similar tech to scramble out the bots.

    Malicious actors and more sophisticated tech is making it increasingly difficult for small businesses to offer their own websites without deferring to big, centralized platforms like Shopify and Amazon. This site uses WooCommerce and WordPress, but at least these are open-source free platforms that you can scale with paid features as your business grows. I’m pushing the limit.

    The demands required of small business websites have in general become more cumbersome. Legal notices are another factor.

    I have issues with the cookie banner sometimes. No matter what selection you make, depending on your browser and settings, it won’t go away. Again, this kind of thing has become imperative only due to privacy laws. Privacy is important. The problem is that these banners annoy people. Every point of friction drives potential customers back to familiar platforms.

    You should be able to visit a website as anonymously as a person walking into a store with cash. Problem is, every ecommerce site owner now needs to verify your email because there are bots attacking us constantly. Maximizing privacy in your browser, and with VPN’s, can trigger security blocks, or make it impossible to employ cookies that make the website work right.

    It’s understandable why one might feel distrusting of an independent website with a very small business. What’s important to remember is that I’m not building all the code, I utilize industry standard services and software to make everything work here. Ultimately, I’m not seeing anything but the shipping and contact info necessary to process orders. I do nothing with it except send a marketing email quite rarely, which can be unsubscribed from easily.

    All in all, this site is far more secure for myself and for the user, having gone to battle with the bots. It is performing better, and it’s now time to get back to the good stuff, like design.

    Thanks for visiting.

  • Held Gear is a Rio Nuevo Grant Recipient

    Held Gear is a Rio Nuevo Grant Recipient

    In January, Groundswell Capital awarded Thru LLC with a Rio Nuevo Impact Grant to invest into Held Gear. The award of $5,000 will be applied to several areas, with the core of the plan to develop an apparel line. When the Belt Farm tee and sweater was introduced at the end of 2022, that was the idea, but it’s very expensive and risky to give it a real go. Unlike a loan, the grant doesn’t get repaid, so the entirety can be risked, and all revenues can be reinvested.

    Altogether, this is what I’m working on right now.

    • Commission an original branded art series
    • Curate and license more art for apparel prints
    • Inventory investment, especially blank garments
    • Printing fees and promotional materials
    • Produce multimedia for promotional campaigns
    • Tooling investment to improve products
    • Mobile display investment for vendor events
    • Vendor fees
    • Advertising

    As an owner-operated business, with no assistants, every bullet point is a hill to climb. I have to divide my attention between these points like several people coordinating their part of the project. I look forward to some day having assistants or business partners, but at least this budget allows me to pay for some help. That said, this project should be complete by the summer.

    The goal is to have products ready to drive digital sales over the summer with a multimedia campaign, followed up with holiday season markets. Ending 2026 should record a major increase in sales volume, to put this brand on a path toward seasonal product drops.

    Rio Nuevo is a special tax district in the City of Tucson and a portion of all sales tax within its lines go into this fund. It provides dozens of small businesses every year with crucial capital. And it is not limited to a single award, so if this goes well, I can develop the next expansion plan for 2027 and reapply.

    Meanwhile, I look forward to rolling out the new apparel line. Keep up with my activities on the socials, especially Instagram. Maybe I’ll start doing TikTok. I don’t know. I’ve been threatening that for a while.

  • New Products. New DePop Listings.

    There is never a shortage of product ideas, only the capacity to inventory and the market to buy them.

    Marketing is the toughest part of the business. This website has been improved substantially, and new marketing materials have been developed.

    To make room for new ideas, I am liquidating overstock on DePop. The DePop store will now be the place for discontinued designs, irregular products, experiments and prototypes.

    A new batch of products have been added as well. They all take advantage of materials on hand, making them affordable to build and easy to inventory.

    The Classic line of products now includes a belt bracelet, a slim belt choker, and a simplified slim waist belt.

    All three of these are made from one-inch strap carefully cut by our fabricator in Michigan, then paired with a nickel-plated brass roller buckle set.

    The roller buckle set is one of the defining aspects of the Classic product line, and they are very dependably restocked.

    The center bar buckle used for the Barbary set is now available as an add-on, and it fits especially with the Classic Slim belt and choker.

    Two universal designs have been added: Portals and Smilodon.

    Dual Prong Belt by Held Gear. THRU LLC 2025.

    Portals are punches all the way across the broad side of any belt (wider than one inch). It is considered a utility belt because it works great with carabiners, and may be ideal for rock climbers, iron workers, perhaps hikers and hunters, but there’s an undeniable style about it that can be enjoyed by anyone.

    Smilodon is commonly known as the Saber Tooth Tiger, iconic for its two great teeth, and the belt features is dual-prong roller buckle with dual snaps. Believe it or not, I couldn’t find any affordable dual roller buckles until very recently. This design can be ordered with any 1.5 inch strap in stock. As of this blog post, that includes the black Classic, the grey Mammoth, the brown Auroch, and the orange Cantaloupe.

    With these few new products available, numerous design bugs fixed on the site, updates and revisions made, and new graphic design layout concepts for advertising, I’m in a much better position to begin a genuine marketing campaign.

    Let’s go.

  • Website Makeover Underway and the New LLC is Official

    Website Makeover Underway and the New LLC is Official

    As of today, the trade name of Held Gear is owned by THRU LLC in the state of Arizona. The federal EIN has also been filed. The flexibility of Arizona’s “any legal purpose” entities make it very easy to start small and grow. There is a broader vision for this company, if successful.

    A new website is now underway, it is an upgrade from an older WordPress theme, and it’s basically a clean slate that you can do almost anything with. All of the content is being revised, and new features are forthcoming.

    Promoting a fashion brand is almost half the product design and half the multimedia that goes into promoting it. From the product photos to modeling, and now the expectation of video plus social content creation, a whole lot of energy goes into the multimedia.

    THRU LLC comes from a publishing brand that I co-created to operate as a magazine back in 2015. We formed Thru Media LLC in Oregon at the time, but it dissolved in 2018. Very tough thing, starting up a magazine.

    In 2022, I brought THRU back because I wanted to publish documentaries and other media again. Held Gear was the excuse for buying the pro camera, because that was necessary for good product images.

    The idea was to file an LLC based out of Philly, but life changed before that happened, and it is fortunate that Arizona has certain advantages for small business formation. In Pennsylvania, you cannot be a fashion designer/retailer/marketplace and publish indie documentaries while doing photo shoots for hire on the side all under one LLC. You would need a minimum of two LLC’s just to get started with that.

    It’s good advice that I’ve heard multiple times, that you just put your idea and brand out there without any official filings to see if you even have a business. I guess that’s what I did.

    Ironically, it had to move away from the testing ground that established I’m capable of it. It’s a retest.

    So off I go to work on this website. And then the next thing. Thanks for reading. Be seeing ya.