Timeline — Epic Desk
Epic Desk swears first use of its own name. There is not yet an Epic Desk. (source)
02:56
The store is created at 2:56 in the morning. It is called Epic Deskpads, which is not the name it keeps.
An X account is registered. For the next three and a half years it is the company's main channel, and it is almost entirely Trey, on his phone. (source)
Nine deskmat designs are built in one sitting, starting at nine at night and finishing at five in the morning. All of them in-house. There are no creators yet.
"The Original" goes live at 11:26pm — a synthwave New York skyline, $59.99. Its own product page explains it: "the first idea I ever had… and thus Epic Desk was born." (source)
SUPPORT
A contact page goes up the day after the first product, pointing at a support address. Support existed before the second product did.
DISCORD
A Discord server is created. It is still where the company sends people who have a problem.
#1001
Order #1001. The first sale in company history, $74.99. Somebody bought a rectangle from a business that had existed for eight weeks.
→ UK
Order #1003 ships to the United Kingdom. Epic Desk is eight weeks old, has four collections and one man packing boxes, and is already an export business.
Four house collections go up — Cityscapes, Cosmic, Landscapes, Ancient Culture. That is the entire company.
The spec is set: 930 by 400 millimetres, 4mm thick, woven spandex blend, runs of 250, hand-signed with a certificate. Five years later the spec has not changed.
"Epic Deskpads" becomes "Epic Desk", and every deskpad on the site becomes a deskmat. Nobody outside the company notices.
NO LICENCE
Rust creators start getting their own mats — about seven months before there is any licence to make them. Nobody asks. It works out.
"Lucroan" launches — the first mat made with a creator rather than for a shelf. The whole company is eventually rebuilt around this one idea.
"imPheetus" — the second creator mat. A cadence starts.
Hello all, we only have 2 days left on the “forkgirl” influencer deskmat for pre-order. This is your ONLY chance to get one, there will not be another restock!
The oldest Epic Desk post that still survives anywhere is a last call on a pre-order nobody remembers. (source)
Happy new year all! Mid 2021 I started Epic Desk because I was sick of the same boring stuff that the gaming giants would feed to us year after year.
The earliest founding statement anybody wrote down, posted to an account with seventy followers. (source)
I’m kind of sad that I sold/gave away all my “1”s of each print. For future designs I will keep them.
Every numbered run has a number one. Trey gave all of his away, and only later realised he would have liked to keep one. (source)
A customer leaves five stars and mentions, in passing, that Trey answered his shipping question personally. There were two people to answer it.
The company vehicle is Trey's truck. In January it is under snow, and the orders still go out.
70 followers. 92 following. Location: Dover, New Hampshire. Bio: "Limited drops. Epic designs. S tier build quality." All three turn out to be the plan. (source)
The site is rebuilt for the first time. It will be rebuilt three more times.
So yeah this is about half the orders from the Gameranx promo 😅
One sponsored mention moves more volume than the shop can comfortably pack. (source)
Bring LIFE to your desk with the “GROWTH” deskmat. Limited Edition with 250 in existence.
The fixed-edition model gets stated in public for the first time. Two hundred and fifty, then never again. (source)
RavLolTV's "My Solo Queue Experience" — the first big League of Legends collab, and the first mat built around a joke its audience already knew. (source)
"ATTENTION RUST GAMERS." Cosmonatic Films' "Beauty Wilderness" launches — the first mat built around Rust itself. (source)
The thousandth order. Seven months after the first one.
It was great to get some vacation time away in Mexico for a couple weeks! Come Monday, back to the grind! Here’s the list of creator deskmats in the works right now.
Back from two weeks away with a pipeline ten creators deep. (source)
I work with content creators in a variety of games, and Rust creators always impress me with their views and engagement. Sadly you guys are like the underdogs that nobody pays attention to.
The observation that quietly becomes the entire business model. (source)
Use code ZILVERK for 20% off!
"Use code ZILVERK for 20% off!" Six words. Four years later it still outranks every product launch and the Facepunch announcement as the account's most-liked post. (source)
Somebody in Australia pays $59.48 to have a $99.98 mat shipped to them. They pay it without complaint, which is the first sign that this is not a domestic business.
Matt Heafy of Trivium becomes the first musician to put his name on a mat. The band line starts here, by accident.
The first sponsored review lands, with a giveaway attached. 179 views, and it works.
Rust's own account: "Announcing a new partnership with @epicdeskshop!" Facepunch makes it official. The unlicensed fan mats become licensed ones. (source)
Anyone in California want to let me borrow their gaming pc next week for the Epic Desk booth at vidcon? I’m just now realizing the logistics of packing an o11 dynamic into a suitcase.
The logistics of taking a booth to VidCon, discovered somewhat late. (source)
A buy-sell-trade channel opens in the Discord, because retired designs never come back and people had started asking. (source)
47 REPLIES
An open call goes out for character artists. Forty-seven people reply. (source)
When your 250+ boxes of Epic Desk mousepads don’t even all fit in your truck to take to the post office and you have to make 2 trips 😵
Shipping volume has now comfortably outgrown the truck. (source)
CoconutB's first drop — the Ook mats. It becomes the longest-running creator relationship the company has.
In the past week and a half we’ve shipped out all of etone, Macro, Templetaps, Coma, and Spinky collabs. Doing the signing and photos of all these takes a while!
Five collabs ship inside ten days. Every mat signed by hand, which is the part that takes the time. (source)
In the Discord, two customers work out what a sealed one is worth. Nobody at Epic Desk taught them to do that.
CoconutB gives mousepads away for an entire Twitch stream. Three-thirty in the afternoon, Central. (source)
IRL
TwitchCon. Epic Desk sells a mat to a human being, face to face, for the first time. (source)
BLACK FRIDAY
The first Black Friday sale. $15 off all stock designs, code BLACKFRIDAY. It works, so the code never changes again. (source)
I fear AI will replace human creativity eventually.
Three and a half years later this is in the bio, on the packaging, and written into company policy. (source)
Shout out to our awesome mail guy Josh who picked up the biggest load we’ve ever given him yesterday!
The mail carrier gets a public shout-out. It is that kind of company. (source)
Sooo umm…. Does any artist out there want to attempt to make an epic mousepad design or two for the band Rush? 😄
A casual ask that becomes the first licensed music mat eight months later. (source)
I need some really unique illustrators that specialize in concept & environmental art. I also need some that have really unique abstract styles.
About seventy replies — still the most any Epic Desk post has ever received. (source)
BY NAME
Artist's Corner launches and the store starts printing illustrators' names on the page beside their art.
404
The YouTube channel disappears. The storefront keeps linking to it for another three years.
Willjum launches a mat to celebrate a million subscribers, live during Twitch Rivals. This is the partnership that reshapes the business, though nobody knows it yet. (source)
Alliestrasza, on her Craig J. Spearing mat: "probably the coolest piece of merch I've ever released." (source)
4,610 followers, up from 70 eighteen months earlier. (source)
I need a web developer that knows html and is familiar with Shopify backend. Anyone know anyone good?
The company is hiring by tweet. It keeps working. (source)
The EPIC DESK trademark is registered. Registration number 7090321. (source)
The site is rebuilt a third time, this one custom. The facelift that was going to be the last one lasted eight months.
NH → FL
The company moves from Dover, New Hampshire to Winter Springs, Florida.
TangoTek's "Dungeon Doors" and "Dungeon Master", announced live on stream. It is the biggest single day the store has ever had.
Rush. "Fly by Night" is the first licensed music mat Epic Desk makes, and the band line stops being an accident.
EsfandTV's "Cletus Cornwood". Not an April Fools joke, despite everything.
Alan Becker — Desktop, Sunset, Blueprint. A stick-figure animator turns out to have excellent taste in rectangles.
25,000
The twenty-five thousandth order lands eleven days before the Better Business Bureau opens its file. That is the honest shape of the year: the volume and the strain arrived together.
BBB
The Better Business Bureau opens a file on Epic Desk. Somebody files a complaint the same day.
OUR FAULT
Epic Desk answers it by accepting the chargeback and admitting support was too slow. That is the correct answer, and it took six days to give.
Blooprint. Two mats, staggered order windows, and a Rust audience measured in millions.
DansGaming's Horror Month mat, built for and timed to an annual stream event.
A Collabs application page goes up so creators can approach Epic Desk instead of the other way round.
AlternateHistoryHub, four mats at once — inside a forty-eight hour stretch in which eleven creator collections go live. Nobody sleeps.
Willjum's "Dopamine Dreams" launches and becomes the best-selling product in company history. It still is.
Looking for a video editor that can do a 30 second commercial to play on socials/twitch for an important creator. I have all the raw video/photos.
Still hiring by tweet, eighteen months later. (source)
+1
Aaron joins to run socials and creative. Until this point the account had been Trey, with help for a while from an assistant who had already moved on.
Tokyo. Then Taiwan, then Hong Kong. About a thousand photographs come back.
Somewhere between the meetings, a grocery store in Taiwan gets photographed more carefully than most of the products do.
Load-in. The first booth arrives in Boston stacked on a pallet, two days before the doors open, and goes in through the freight door like everybody else's.
The day before PAX East opens, two of us are in a Walmart buying lights. The booth itself was the most expensive thing the company had ever paid for — nobody had costed the lighting.
PAX East, Boston. The first trade show. The wall goes up, the camera goes on a tripod, and the mats get shot on the floor because there is nowhere else to shoot them.
Epic Desk gets into the Red Bull lounge at PAX on the strength of Aaron's personal TikTok following rather than the company's. Borrowing somebody else's audience is, in fairness, the entire business model.
August the Duck's "Duck's Retreat" — a top-fifteen seller off one design.
The fabric gets a name: LuxeWeave™. Same fabric. Better name.
The first playmat is quietly built two months before anyone announces a playmat line. It is never published.
#0FA7FF
New logo, new colour guide. The blue moves from #0872BA to #0FA7FF, which nobody outside the building can see but everybody inside argues about.
The Creator Club goes public. Collaborations stop being a run of one-off deals and become a roster with ranks.
1 POST 5 YEARS
Epic Desk publishes a blog post comparing cloth and glass mouse pads. It is the only blog post the company has published in five years. (source)
TARKOV DESIGNS IN STOCK NOW! How did wipe day go for all you Tarkov players out there? 👀
Tarkov joins the list of games with a wipe day Epic Desk plans around. (source)
Cherry Blossom Serenity — the first collection built around a mood rather than a game.
IN A TUBE
Packaging finally gets designed on purpose: a sleeve for the mat and a tube to post it in. For four years it had shipped in whatever fit.
Sleep Token. The largest licensed build the store has ever done — and, the same week, the first glass mouse pad.
50,000
The fifty thousandth order. The second twenty-five thousand took sixteen months; the first took nearly three years.
35 SKUS
LA Comic Con. Thirty-five products built for a table.
A Bluesky account is created. It posts three times, gains zero followers, and is never spoken of again.
Dream Theater. Eleven designs for a band whose fans measure things in movements.
+ STAFF
The company hires. After four and a half years of two or three people, there are suddenly more names than there are chairs.
ANTIREAL — a cyberpunk artist licence, and the boldest-looking collection on the store.
Craig J. Spearing's "Realms of Eternity" lands and ten playmats launch in one day. Epic Desk is quietly now a trading-card company.
Grammy-winning progressive metal legend Dream Theater set the bar for progressive metal bands. Pick up one of there exclusive deskmats on our site today!
Dream Theater's mats are announced to the world. Nobody proofreads the post, and it goes out with a typo. (source)
Step into the future with our boldest collection yet. Decipher our cyberpunk-themed desk mats by ANTIREAL.
ANTIREAL goes wide. (source)
Attack on Titan goes live. Anime licensing turns out to be a completely different sport.
PAX East again. The flat wall is gone; the second booth is two storeys of it, and it cost considerably more than the first one. At some point the trade-show budget stopped being an experiment.
BWT Alpine Formula One. The first motorsport licence, and the biggest one to date.
We’re proud to be the ONLY brand offering Official Sleep Token desk mats crafted with perfection. Don’t miss your chance to own this exclusive piece.
A claim the company is actually in a position to make. (source)
DackFive's "BRAINBOX™ MK1" goes from design to live in a single day.
The Creator Club gets seasons, ranks and a points shop. Creators now hold a permanent rank, Iron through Diamond.
Bio: "The world's best deskmats. No AI 'Art', EVER. Limited drops every other Friday." Location: Orlando. It said Dover, New Hampshire for the first two years. (source)
Introducing our newest Official Rust drop “Shh”. Happy Wipe Day!!
Epic Desk has posted on Rust wipe day for four years. The ritual is intact. (source)
America 250 and the National Parks line — the first big in-house collection in years with nothing to do with a video game.
"My gf vs limited mouse pad." Customer story of the year, and it is only July.
The entire storefront is rebuilt in a day — seventy-three commits in one sitting. The fourth rebuild, and the first one anybody planned.
164 FINDINGS
A full audit of the public site finds 164 things wrong with it. Sixteen are fixed the same day.
610
610 products are renamed in a single pass. Zero mismatches, which is the only acceptable score.
2026
Somebody reaches the end of the Epic Desk timeline. They have just scrolled the entire length of a five-year-old desk mat company and are now, presumably, going to go and look at a desk mat.