Why Vietnamese Coins?
Why do I care so much about Vietnamese coins? It's a valid question -- and if I can't answer it about my own product, why should anyone else care? So let's do this.
I spend my career making things no one loves. Such is the nature of outsourcing. I immigrated to Vietnam to start a tech company. This is what I do all day.
Like immigrants everywhere, I struggle with the language, and to be accepted as less foreign. So as part of that, I set out to study Vietnamese history. It caught me off guard -- on one hand, the way it is typically written can be described as bureaucratic. If you spend some time with it though, and summarize it in your head a little, the stories are amazing! I'd describe it as 'Game of Thrones' on hard mode.
So quite by accident, I began to care a lot about the stories of various Vietnamese emperors. By chance, I also bought some shipwreck scrap someone found while dredging a river, and got some badly damaged old coins in it. I thought it might be fun to try and identify them, and picked up a hard copy of "Annam and its Minor Currencies", the only book I could find on the subject. Since it was written in 1882, you can read it for free here.
I found that having these coins as a 'touchstone' to the periods they were minted in was really cool! I could imagine each coin changing hands as the events in each emperor's reign unfolded. I began to look for more coins... and then still more coins, until one day I realized I was capable of sourcing rather a lot of them through my network.
Around this time, I also began to notice other numismatic products on the market. Notably, I could read enough Chữ Nôm by now to tell that they weren't just fake -- they had Chinese emperor names on them! While I also enjoy studying Chinese history, I was invested enough in the stories of Vietnamese emperors that this deeply disappointed me. While we're being completely honest, I quietly got a little angry.
So the Artifact brand started to come together as an effort to do something better, a genuine 'touchstone to Vietnamese history'. Something real, to help us remember. So I decided to take a moment away from outsourcing, and make something out of love for once. I don't expect to make much money doing this -- scaling production that requires both obscure knowledge and literal artifacts as inputs? I'd be laughed out of any startup pitch event, that's for sure!
If the brand makes some money, then I can use that to create more products, and tell more stories. Just between the two of us though, if I can kindle your interest in Vietnamese history, then that will be enough for me.
I spend my career making things no one loves. Such is the nature of outsourcing. I immigrated to Vietnam to start a tech company. This is what I do all day.
Like immigrants everywhere, I struggle with the language, and to be accepted as less foreign. So as part of that, I set out to study Vietnamese history. It caught me off guard -- on one hand, the way it is typically written can be described as bureaucratic. If you spend some time with it though, and summarize it in your head a little, the stories are amazing! I'd describe it as 'Game of Thrones' on hard mode.
So quite by accident, I began to care a lot about the stories of various Vietnamese emperors. By chance, I also bought some shipwreck scrap someone found while dredging a river, and got some badly damaged old coins in it. I thought it might be fun to try and identify them, and picked up a hard copy of "Annam and its Minor Currencies", the only book I could find on the subject. Since it was written in 1882, you can read it for free here.
I found that having these coins as a 'touchstone' to the periods they were minted in was really cool! I could imagine each coin changing hands as the events in each emperor's reign unfolded. I began to look for more coins... and then still more coins, until one day I realized I was capable of sourcing rather a lot of them through my network.
Around this time, I also began to notice other numismatic products on the market. Notably, I could read enough Chữ Nôm by now to tell that they weren't just fake -- they had Chinese emperor names on them! While I also enjoy studying Chinese history, I was invested enough in the stories of Vietnamese emperors that this deeply disappointed me. While we're being completely honest, I quietly got a little angry.
So the Artifact brand started to come together as an effort to do something better, a genuine 'touchstone to Vietnamese history'. Something real, to help us remember. So I decided to take a moment away from outsourcing, and make something out of love for once. I don't expect to make much money doing this -- scaling production that requires both obscure knowledge and literal artifacts as inputs? I'd be laughed out of any startup pitch event, that's for sure!
If the brand makes some money, then I can use that to create more products, and tell more stories. Just between the two of us though, if I can kindle your interest in Vietnamese history, then that will be enough for me.
