After seven years, the famous Ikea Hackers blog is being forced to change its name by Ikea because the blogger used the Ikea name without permission. It sucks because Ikea Hackers is such a great blog where the community comes together to share tips on how to use the furniture in ways that Ikea never intended. Smart, creative, and wonderful.
Unfortunately it also happened to us several weeks ago when eBay sent us a legal notice that ebayscavengers.com was infringing on their trademark. I guess we could have been angry, but why? When we started the blog we never thought anyone would care so we didn’t really think through the ramifications of what a trademark is. It’s just a name.
So as you see, we’re changing our name to “Scavenger Life”. We’re still eBay scavengers, but we’ve always been more than just people who scavenge to sell on eBay. First, we were people moving to rural America to live more frugally. We were learning to grow food, how to build, how to live healthier, how to sleep more restfully, how to spend more time on personal projects, how to become part of the community in a small town. But we learned that living cheap isn’t enough, and eBay helped us solve this piece of the puzzle. By scavenging all the treasures lying around, we could make the money we needed because you need money to live in this world. This new name, “Scavenger Life”, will make more sense as we post about the other ways we find freedom because our life isn’t just about making money.
As you also probably noticed, we have a couple sponsors on our sidebar who are helping fund our ability to spend time on this blog. The more we blog and podcast, the less we can list. We love selling on eBay so it’s a careful balance. The advertising is an experiment like any of our eBay experiments. Hopefully everyone profits.
We will continue to post two podcasts a week, plus a Q&A so we can solve our common questions. We’ll continue to share our numbers and be as transparent as possible about our evolving process since we enjoy talking about our mistakes and how we solve them. Our future goal is to also make more videos to show what we do. Video is fun.
In the past year, we LOVE all the emails we’ve gotten from people who
tell us what their life was like and how scavenging helped them become
independent. Instead of being afraid of giving away “our secrets”, we
realize we’re just joining an existing network of other people who are learning to live
the way they want. There’s so much abundance. Let’s have fun.