One of the biggest surprises I encountered when I entered the Betta hobby wasn't the fish.
It was how they were sold.
As a customer, I assumed buying a Betta Fish would be simple. Find a fish I liked, pay for it and wait for it to arrive.
In reality, I quickly discovered that many Betta Fish are sold from representative photographs rather than photographs of the actual fish available for sale.
For some hobbyists, that's perfectly acceptable.
For me, it wasn't.
Because I wasn't buying a strain.
I was buying a fish.
There is a huge difference.
Two fish can both be labelled as Blue Rim, Red Samurai, Snow Dragon, Platinum or Mustard Gas and yet look completely different from one another. One may have exceptional finnage, another a stronger body shape, another better colour, and another simply stand out more.
The more fish I purchased, the more I realised I wasn't interested in buying categories.
I was interested in finding individuals.
The fish that catches your eye.
The fish you keep coming back to.
The fish you'd happily make room for in your own collection.
The Question I Kept Coming Back To
The more fish I bought, the more one question kept returning.
Why is this considered normal?
Why is it normal to spend significant money on a fish you've never actually seen? Why is it normal to choose a fish based on a representative photograph and simply hope the fish arriving at your door resembles the image?
More importantly, why had so many of us simply accepted it?
The answer, I think, is because for a long time there wasn't much alternative. If you wanted access to a wider variety of fish, buying from representative photographs was often just part of the process.
And to be fair, many hobbyists have received fantastic fish that way.
But I couldn't shake the feeling that there had to be a better approach.
Because when I buy a Betta Fish, I'm not buying a strain.
I'm not buying a label.
I'm buying a specific fish.
That fish matters.
And if it matters to me, I suspect it matters to other hobbyists too.
What Happened When I Started Searching
Like most people entering a hobby, I started with Google.
I searched for Betta Fish.
I searched for premium Bettas.
I searched for the best places to buy Bettas in the UK.
Then I clicked the businesses that appeared at the top.
It's probably exactly what you're doing right now.
At the time, I assumed that's simply how everybody bought fish. You find a website, browse what's available and buy a fish.
What I quickly discovered was that the experience varied enormously depending on where you looked.
Some businesses focused on volume.
Some focused on variety.
Some relied heavily on representative photography.
Then every so often I'd come across a fish that made me stop scrolling.
A fish that felt genuinely special.
One of the businesses that consistently stood out to me was Aqua Factor. In fact, several of the females that form part of my own collection today came from them.
The reason was simple.
I could see the fish.
Not a representative fish.
Not a similar fish.
The actual fish.
As a hobbyist, I immediately appreciated that.
It reinforced something I was already beginning to realise: when you're passionate about Bettas, the individual fish matters. The small differences between fish are often the entire reason you're making the purchase in the first place.
Looking back, there's a certain irony in all of this.
I started my journey by searching Google and clicking whatever happened to appear at the top.
Now I find myself learning about SEO, indexing, metadata, keywords and search rankings so that Obsidian can one day appear alongside those same businesses.
When I started this hobby, I had no idea what SEO even stood for.
I thought the challenge would be finding exceptional fish.
As it turns out, finding the fish was the easy part.
Getting people to find you afterwards is an entirely different challenge.
Collection First. Everything Else Second.
When I began sourcing fish for Obsidian, I adopted a simple rule.
If I wouldn't personally keep the fish, I wouldn't buy it.
That sounds obvious.
It isn't.
Buying fish individually takes time.
A lot of time.
While wholesale purchasing allows large numbers of fish to be selected quickly, that's never been my approach.
Most evenings involve scrolling through breeders in Thailand and Indonesia, comparing fish, reviewing bloodlines, saving screenshots, changing my mind, coming back the following day and then repeating the process all over again.
It's not efficient.
It's probably not sensible.
But it's the only way I know how to do it.
Every fish at Obsidian is selected with one question in mind:
Would I genuinely want this fish in my own collection?
If the answer is no, I move on.
If the answer is yes, I keep looking.
Then I look again.
And probably once more for good measure.
That approach takes considerably longer than buying fish by volume, but it means every fish earns its place.
Because Obsidian was never built around selling as many fish as possible.
It was built around creating a collection I could genuinely be proud of.
The Part I Completely Underestimated
What I didn't realise was that finding the fish would become the easy part.
The photography.
The videography.
The website.
The branding.
The packaging.
The editing.
The writing.
The endless evenings spent learning skills I never expected to need.
At some point I found myself researching SEO and wondering how a hobby involving fish had somehow led me into learning how search engines work.
I'm still not entirely convinced I understand it.
Turns out selecting exceptional fish is only half the job.
Photographing them properly, filming them, editing content, building a website around them and somehow explaining to Google what a Blue Rim Betta is takes considerably longer than expected.
What started as a search for better Bettas somehow became a crash course in photography, web design, branding and content creation.
All because I wanted people to see the actual fish.
Why Every Fish Is Photographed Individually
This is why every fish at Obsidian is photographed individually.
Not because it's easy.
Not because it's efficient.
Quite the opposite.
It's time consuming.
It's frustrating.
Sometimes fish refuse to cooperate.
Sometimes they decide that today is the day they absolutely will not hold still.
But it's worth it.
Because when somebody purchases a fish from Obsidian, I want them to know exactly what they're getting.
No surprises.
No representative photographs.
No guessing.
Just the fish they chose.
The fish that made them stop scrolling in the first place.
Why Obsidian Exists
Obsidian Betta Co. wasn't built because I wanted to start a business.
It was built because I wanted to solve a problem I kept encountering as a hobbyist.
I wanted to see the fish.
I wanted to choose the fish.
I wanted to know that the fish arriving at my door was the fish that made me stop scrolling in the first place.
Everything else came afterwards.
The photography.
The branding.
The website.
The content.
The endless hours of work behind the scenes.
The fish came first.
They always will.
Because at the heart of Obsidian is the same philosophy that started this journey in the first place:
If I wouldn't be proud to add a fish to my own collection, it doesn't belong at Obsidian.
Collection first.
Everything else second.