Zalēm Industries Acquired! An Interview With Cardistry Touch

This week, the brand acquisition of Zalēm Industries by Cardistry Touch has generated quite a buzz within the Cardistry community. This marks the first time that two cardistry brands have combined forces. Zalēm Industries will now operate as a brand within Cardistry Touch with independent deck design and synergized vision, ideas, and visuals.

We spoke to the team at Cardistry Touch about the merged brands and what fans and cardists can expect going forward. 

What led to the brand acquisition of Zalēm Industries? 

Well… Alex’s designs are amazing. We knew that before we knew the guy. They’re different, bold, simple yet effective, but that’s not the main reason why we thought that brand had potential: after meeting and talking with Alex simply as friends, we understood that he had a vision with zalēm, more than just making cool card designs. That’s something we really appreciate in brands, and something we try to do with Touch. 

It’s a whole creative world, that offers infinite possibilities but we felt that he needed help to get his brand to the next level, and we decided to take him under our wing. Don’t get me wrong though, Alex is a great friend but we’re not doing that to “be nice”, we truly believe that this project has great potential and that it’ll benefit us all long term! Together we re-defined the vision, rebuilt the @zalem.industries Instagram from scratch so that it shows the brand’s new and clear purpose. We worked a lot to deeply understand Alex’s vision and create something practical that represents it, to be able to share it with the world.

This whole thing also simply fits one of our main mottos in life: we want to do what we love, and do it with our friends. And new projects are simply existing! 

 

How will the creative process of combining the two brands work?

Well, now that we have set up a clear vision long term of what we want this brand to be, the process will be fairly easy: we trust Alex 100% on the actual design of the decks, we work on promo ideas and visuals altogether, and we (Touch) take care of the production and “back-end” type of stuff: with Touch, we already have a very solid base, so it’s not that hard for us to implement a new project like Zalēm.

Of course, the idea is to listen and to trust each other. We will always, question ourselves, and try to improve our process along the way. 

How will the addition of Zalēm Industries benefit existing Cardistry Touch fans?
Since the beginning, we’ve always made the products that we want ourselves to have. Things that we think are cool, beautiful, creative, interesting… That means if you like what we do, you somehow have the same kind of taste as us. Zalēm is no exception: we wouldn’t put our name on a project that is not 100% up to our standard. 

If you like what we do at Cardistry Touch, you’ll probably like what we do over at Zalēm. Since the beginning, when we introduced our “cardistry cards”, we also had a lot of questions about making actual “playing cards”, with faces and everything, and to be honest we wouldn’t do it with “Touch”. It just doesn’t fit the vision of the brand. We don’t have anything against playing cards though, and producing them through zalēm seems like a perfect opportunity for us. 

So, what comes next, in 2021 and beyond?
Haha, not sure I can tell you a lot about future projects right now, but we do have a long-term plan for Zalēm, with a lot of great stuff coming. We also want to expand to more than cardistry for this brand, as it’s something we won’t do with Touch, and it seems like a cool challenge to take on. In short terms, I guess we’ll focus on creating beautiful decks, creative content, and try to firmly establish zalēm as a solid brand.

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