What a YouTube Volcano Taught Me About Merch (And Myself)

I’ve been thinking lately about a chapter of my life that feels both close and far away: the time I ran merch for the Two Pineapples YouTube channel.

For a while, that project was a really bright spot for me. I loved the idea of creating stuff that connected people to something they were passionate about—lava, eruptions, and this little online community gathered around a volcano on the Big Island.

And then life happened.

Natalie’s situation took over my mental bandwidth. A lot of my energy went into just getting through each day. The merch store didn’t get the attention and imagination it really needed. I never missed an order, but I definitely wasn’t able to show up the way I had planned.

For a long time, I carried that as a quiet regret.

This is me revisiting that story with a different lens.

The First Round: What Actually Happened

When I first started doing merch for Two Pineapples, I did what a lot of creators and small business owners do:

• I tried to keep adding more products.
• I assumed that “more options” meant “more chances to sell.”
• I thought the main job was to guess what people would want.

But the reality of the audience didn’t match that assumption.

A big piece of the community had money struggles. They loved the channel, loved the lava, loved the people—but extra cash for a shirt or mug wasn’t always there. That doesn’t mean the merch was bad or the idea was wrong; it just means economics matter more than enthusiasm sometimes.

At the same time, the volcano itself had settled into this weird rhythm: it would erupt for a day, go quiet for 5–8 days, then erupt again. Over and over. For months.

At first, that pattern was exciting. Over time, it became emotionally exhausting.

The eruptions stopped feeling rare and special and started feeling like a choppy background track. And whether I fully realized it or not, that same burnout bled into the merch.

I was trying to make “more volcano stuff” when people were already hitting their limit on volcano everything.

The Strategy I Didn’t See Back Then

Looking back now, the lesson feels obvious:

I shouldn’t have tried to build an ever-growing catalog.

I should have mimicked the volcano.

Short bursts. Clear cycles. Moments in time.

Instead of a wall of products that just… sat there, I could have:

• Treated each eruption cycle (or every 2–3 cycles) as a Season.
• Dropped a small, curated set of designs tied to that moment.
• Retired those designs when the cycle ended and moved on.

It’s almost funny in hindsight.

The volcano was right there, giving me the blueprint: erupt → cool down → reset → erupt again.

I just didn’t see it yet.

The Missed Gold: Inside Jokes and Episode Names

The part that really hit me, thinking back, is this:

In the early days, the community wasn’t just watching lava. We were being goofy together.

We’d name episodes based on random stuff that happened that night. Little moments, weird glitches, funny comments—those became the informal titles. They were the kind of references where, if you knew, you knew.

And that was a missed golden opportunity for fun merch.

Not just “volcano shirt #12,” but:

• Shirts named after those legendary streams
• Phrases only the regulars would understand
• “You had to be there” designs that acted like secret handshake symbols

I thought I needed designs that would appeal broadly.

What I actually needed were artifacts that said:

“I was there for that night. I remember.”

That’s the difference between generic merch and community merch.

How My Tools (and Brain) Have Changed

When I was running that store, I was doing everything more or less “by hand”:

• Manually dreaming up designs
• Manually writing listings
• Manually trying to keep things fresh

Now, my workflow looks completely different.

I use AI as a creative assistant and production helper. That means I can:

• Generate a bunch of design concepts from a simple prompt
• Quickly mock them up and get feedback
• Batch-create product titles, descriptions, and tags
• Spin up social posts and emails around each “drop” without starting from zero every time

On top of that, my thinking has shifted from:

“What products should I add?”

to

“What moments are we preserving?”

That’s a big mental switch.

If I Ran It Today: Eruption Seasons

If I were to go back in time and design a new system around Two Pineapples, it might look something like this:

Eruption Seasons
Every 2–3 eruption cycles becomes a Season.

Each Season gets:

• 1–2 main designs that capture what was special about that stretch of time
• 1 “deep cut” design based on an inside joke, offbeat moment, or unofficial episode title

Those designs are:

• Available only during that Season
• Clearly marked as limited and time-bound
• Retired afterward and moved into an Archive (a visual history of the channel, not a permanent store shelf)

Maybe once a year there’s a “Lava Vault” event where the community votes one or two old designs back into circulation for a short window. More ritual, less randomness.

With the tools I have now, I could build that entire cycle into a repeatable workflow:

1. Eruption pattern or big moment happens.
2. Capture the quotes, jokes, and visuals from that stream.
3. Generate a handful of designs via AI.
4. Pick the best few, create the drop, schedule posts and emails.
5. Let it live. Let it expire. Archive. Move on.

Short, intentional, story-driven.

Letting Go of Regret, Keeping the Lessons

For a while, I looked back at the Two Pineapples merch era and thought:

“I should have done better.”

And sure, in some alternate version of reality, I had more capacity, more tools, more clarity, and I nailed it.

In this reality, my life got turned upside down. I still fulfilled every order. I didn’t ghost people. I did the best I could with what I had at the time.

That counts.

Now I can see that:

• The audience’s financial reality matters as much as their enthusiasm.
• Burnout is real, and you can design around it.
• Merch works best when it reflects moments, not just logos.
• Limited cycles and rituals beat endless catalogs for tight-knit communities.
• Better tools don’t make Past Me wrong; they make Present Me better.

I don’t know if I’ll ever reconnect with that project or if it’s just going to live as a memory and a lesson. Either way, it shaped how I think about Shaka Brands, Ohana Underground, and anything else I build from here.

The volcano taught me something bigger than “lava sells shirts.”

It taught me that the best merch doesn’t just say, “Look at this thing I like.”
It says, “I was there. This meant something to me.”

And that’s the kind of story I want everything I create to tell.