Fantazio

I am a big Lord of the Rings fan. In 2014, the year I finished university, I wanted a replica of the One Ring and went to order one from AliExpress. There I noticed I could order ten and sell the other nine. On the eleventh of November 2014 I bought about a thousand dollars of small merchandise. I did not know how AliExpress works: every supplier ships separately. So for the next few months the post came every day with a few more packages, more than two hundred of them from China, and every day was a new adventure. In those first months, the top cabinet of the wall closet in my bedroom was the whole warehouse. The first order came before I had published or advertised anything. Someone bought a Mockingjay pin from The Hunger Games, and I called him to ask how he had found the site.

Fans order on fantazio.ir: wands, printed hoodies, resin figures and much more. Over the years we made more and more of it ourselves. Clothes were printed in our own factory and statues cast in our resin workshop, and many new products started as prototypes on my 3D printer. Orders are packed and shipped from our warehouse, and the software I wrote around the store keeps stock, production and shipping in step.

Besides running the company, I wrote the software behind it. A few years in, the dollar rose so far that importing stopped working, so we moved to making things. In 2017 I merged Fantazio with Boomerang, Ali KiaKazemi's clothing and printing company, which gave us a factory, and we added a resin workshop. Black Friday 2020 was our golden day: more than 1,500 orders and 5,800 products in two days. The best product from our workshop is the illuminating wand, with an LED, a battery, resistors and a button inside a wand from the films. I could make it because I had played with circuit boards and Arduino for years.

Fantazio grew to more than 25 people in-house and more than a hundred working for it directly and indirectly, and it became the official merchandise partner of Kouman, one of the biggest Persian YouTube channels. Its video team, Fantazio Studio, published 35 videos before the war in 2025 put it on hold. I stepped away in January 2026 when I moved to Canada, and the store is still open at fantazio.ir.