#minmie

What is Minmie?

Minmie is a thailand-based apparel brand that lasted from 2005 to (rougly) 2017. The brand was owned by SS Product and often associated with a brand by the name of Makescents, although looking inti that company is rather difficult. Most of the illustrations for the brand, particularly in the late 2000s and some of the 2010s, were credited to 1304/130-4r/1304r, but this is also very difficult to research, and I haven't found the actual identity of the artist/artists behind them.

Multiple bilingual children's books were created with the Minmie characters, primarily featuring the Sister, Minmie/Mie

Who is Minmie?

Minmie is the combination of the names of the titular twins, Min and Mie, although later in the brand's run, the sister would take on the combined name Minmie, while Min would keep his name. There's no in-universe explanation for this change, at least to my knowledge.

Mie is confirmed to be Gyaru/Gal, and Min is often shown to be a DJ, or interested in Hip Hop subculture. Both of them had similar fashion sense in the earlier days of the brand, taking a lot from black culture when it came to the way they were presented. Mie would eventually branch out to have her own fashion style, which was more feminine, and many times used a lot of pink. She often dabbled in different fashion styles, which was something Min most certainly did not do, his clothing style remaining the same as it was when the brand first began.

Minmie Resources

SWFs from the Minmie website site map. They are not categorized by year yet.

MinMieTopia YT channel (contains video recordings of SWFs)

This capture is from February of 2006, two years after the site was launched and six before it would be taken down. The 2004 capture's flash elements are inaccessible (but still there!), and for some odd reason the animation of Minmie and her man(?)* on the Vespa is inaccessible on every later capture.

*Edit: It's her brother. I was writing this as I was going along, I had no clue who he was at first😭

That blue part of the background is animated, and the text scrolls. I forgot to capture it in the video I think, but the red mailbox hops up and down when you hover on it.

The top animation seems to restart after a certain amount of time.

The 10 squares at the bottom bring you these images, and they're the same in every capture.

Slightly problematic "Attack Gangster" caption aside...

It's kind of weird how low quality these are, right?? This is the official website. These images literally come directly from the page those squares lead to. Also that last one of the boy character terrifies me. Also....does the seventh image imply that the boy's name is Min and the girl's name is Mie?? It would be hella weird if it did, considering that after the DJ Min image, the name Minmie was exclusively used to describe the girl in merchandising. Because they never used the boy again. I didn't even know he existed until now.

I love Minmie's art style so I'm kind of disturbed by the way male characters look in it-

I find it really interesting the way they draw her jawline sometimes, it's very round. They only seemed to do this in the 2000s, after 2011 she had an exclusively sharp jaw.

It's surprisingly low effort on everything but those little animations and transitions, there. The pages listed on the buttons are inaccessible no matter what capture you're on, although in the October 2008 capture, the "Character" button leads to a different page with content that Ruffle can't run. This is different from the others in which the buttons don't do anything at all when you click on them on the front page's archive. The "mail" option leads to an error page in the 2006 capture, although similar to the Character page, in every other capture it doesn't do anything at all. The "Shop" option leads to a site to purchase the Minmie domain instead of an archive for some reason. The "board" button seems to have lead to either a chat room or image board, but it's not accessible from the main menu and the URL is a swf, which I can't access. There's an "about me" page in the URL tab on the archive, but nothing loads.

HOWEVER!

We still have the site map, and the site map actually gives us the pages the buttons led to.

The shop page looked like this. I don't find it necessary to screenshot all of the options on the menu because all of them are pretty much the same, just with a different title, sometimes a longer page, and different inventory (the photos of which were not archived). Although I think it's very amusing how one of the shop pages is just named "bunch of keys". The "New Product" gif's background would rapidly flash black and white.

Here's the New Product pages (there's two for some reason).

New Product 1

New product 2

Like I said earlier, the pages look mostly the same. Because of this I only screenshotted the pages that had a different layout. Sadly the shop page is the only part archived through the site map.

Now we look to the URL tab. There's several gifs that are unavailable, and while it was also unavailable there's two gifs with the word "avatar" in their titles. This might also be nothing, though. The domain squatting sites were and continue to be archived even after the original site went down, so a majority of the URLs are from those. A lot of the old Minmie files lead to a blank or unavailable screen, however.

But back to what I did find:

There's this strange part of the site I found, and it's a menu with some futuristic graphics. It has a lot of moving parts, and buttons.

I have no clue what any of these lead to, the URLs that have names relating to some of these buttons just lead to the menu, again. The image to the side is blocked, and there's only one date of capture for the three URLS, so for now that's a mystery. I assume the background was a repeating pattern based on the order of the missing images in the back. Green binary over a black background, perhaps?

I found parts of the index page from 2012/11. Any other captures of this iteration of the site are fully unavailable, with many of the assets meeting the same fate as the right image in the futuristic menu page. These are super cute.

The red text is an error message. The catalog has the same layout. I think the most interesting thing about this version of the site is that one of the catalog pages has an option that says "Minmie doll". I would love it if anyone could give me any insight about that.

There's two images here that show the site when it was active during the early 2010s.

Both are from @tmgc's blog.

The 2011/12 site also has Wallpapers listed. They are all unavailable. there's multiple game pages (for both versions of the site, actually) but they both have nothing at all archived.

There's some more from this version of the site, I'll reblog with those images though. There's this huge image gallery of images from several events that I won't be able to fit in here

And now, we have some comic pages! They confirm the boy and girl are named Min and Mie respectively. I refuse to ever give that idea any credibility. I put them in a webtoon-adjacent order for more convenient reading :)

[page 3-6 are missing]

[Pages 9-14 are missing]

I have a feeling I know why these pages in specific were archived...