The ‘History’ of Panda Workshop

What’s this panda thing all about, anyway?

In December of the year 2000, 3-year-old giant panda Tian Tian and 2-year-old giant panda Mei Xiang arrived in the United States to live at the Smithsonian National Zoo as part of a 10-year agreement with the Chinese government.

Also in the year 2000, my father was on a business trip that took him through a Washington, D.C. airport, which was at the time inundated by panda merchandise (perhaps as part of an attempt by the Smithsonian to recoup some of the $10 million spent to get their hands on the aforementioned panda pair.)

While on this journey, something possessed my dad to buy two panda stuffed animals to bring home to my brother and me. And thus it was that one fateful morning, I awoke to a fluffy, black and white shape in my bed.

*The bear, the myth, the legend: my stuffed panda Tian Tian (at times both TN-TN and Tien Tien, according to my level of language sophistication and Pinyin translation trends) in the flesh.*

That single event set me on a lifelong course of loving pandas more loyally and ferociously than perhaps any other human in recorded history. It also inspired me to begin my artistic panda forays with the (as yet unpublished) title King Panda, which I penned and illustrated in the second grade.

*Twenty-year-old first-edition copies of* King Panda and its sequel, Prince Panda; clearly I had *a complex understanding of ideas like brand continuity and cover design when I was 8–though I did misspell “sequel.” (So close, little me; so close.)*

King Panda and its successors were not exactly literary marvels–I often, having lost the thread of the plot but facing many pages of pre-stapled paper yet to fill, devolved into describing the meals that characters ate in meticulous detail. Still, several installations of this royal panda series followed, as did the launch of my “brand,” Panda Workshop.

(If you’re having trouble understanding how an elementary schooler launches a brand, simply picture a precocious eight-year-old emblazoning the back of everything they write, draw, craft, or make out of macaroni with a huge “Panda Workshop” illustration, and you’ll get the idea.)

The Panda Workshop Inc. logo has undergone many transformations over the years–at some point absorbing the “Inc.” suffix despite never having formally incorporated–and I did, eventually, stop stamping every single thing I created with its mark.

But the brand lives on in my love for books, writing, and making art–as well as in my wildly unrealistic dreams of forging a creative empire whose single cohesive element is pandas.

This blog is a product of that love, and it is my hope that as Panda Reads (a subsidiary of Panda Workshop Inc.) grows, it will help foster a similar love in anyone who seeks it. ❤