Meet The New Marketing Team!

By Ellis & Nick - 14-Jan-2026

Meet the Marketers

Meet The New Marketing Team!

We’ve been chatting with you for a while, but we forgot to introduce ourselves! We’re Ellis and Nick, your Vanishing Inc. Marketing Team. Like most of the team here, we’re both magicians and have been fans of Vanishing Inc. long before we became employees. We wanted to take the time to tell you a bit about ourselves!

Who are you, where are you from, and how did you get into magic?

Ellis: My name is Ellis, and I’m from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. When I was a kid, my parents decided to have our family vacation be a train trip. We flew to San Francisco for a trip and took the train back to Pittsburgh, but before we left San Francisco, my dad bought me Royal Road, and by the time I got off the train, I was hooked.

Nick: My name is Nick. I’m from Redlands, California. My interest in magic started when I was nine, after my dad made a coin vanish into his elbow. It completely blew my mind, and I’ve been hooked ever since.

What do you do at Vanishing Inc.?

Ellis: Our team is small, so we end up doing a lot of different things. Some days I'm writing descriptions for new products, other days I'm planning our emails, our coming up with ideas for product releases. My favorite part of my job is figuring out new ways to build out and interact with the Vanishing Inc. community.

Nick: I work on the marketing team, helping write emails, product copy, and posting on social media.

What’s your favorite magic book?

Ellis: I'm a big book guy. I think my all-time favorite might be The Books of Wonder. There's great magic and great theory. What's not to love?

Nick: 13 Steps to Mentalism is probably my number one. It’s one of the magic books that I still reference to this day.

What sort of magic do you do?

Ellis: Most of my gigs are strolling, so I do a lot of classic close-up magic and mentalism. That being said, I’m working on branching out and putting together a stand-up act.

Nick: Mentalism is my primary focus. I was first interested in it at eleven, after my mom bought me Self-Working Mental Magic by Karl Fulves, and it has remained my favorite style to perform. I still love close-up magic as well. I like to say that I practice close-up magic, but I perform mentalism.

Who are your favorite magicians to watch?

Ellis: There are a lot, but if I had to narrow it down, I’d pick Guy Hollingworth, Dani DaOrtiz, Piff the Magic Dragon, and Carisa Hendrix. They're all incredibly different, but that's part of what I like about magic.

Nick: Some of my favorite performers are Derren Brown, Luke Jermay, Asi Wind, and Christian Grace. All great thinkers who have influenced the way I think about performing magic and mentalism.

What are your favorite Vanishing Inc. releases?

Ellis: Particle System

$100.00

Probably Particle System, by Joshua Jay. (I’m not just saying this because he’s my boss!) Learning a memorized deck was daunting, but now it's one of the most powerful tools in my repertoire. While I don’t use the Particle Stack anymore, I use a bunch of these routines, and the book has genuinely changed the way I think about stack. If you know a stack already, you'll get to read some great essays on using stack and learn a ton of killer memdeck routines. If you've never used a stack, this is an amazing entry point. Particle Stack is twice as fast to learn and has lots of crazy built-in features. I highly recommend it.

Particle System

Nick: Premise and Premonition

$75.00

Definitely one of my favorites is Premise and Premonition by Luke Jermay. Luke’s influenced the way I approach mentalism in a big way, and this project is a huge part of that. It’s like spending an entire day with Luke and having him teach you all of his secrets. It's for sure one I'll go back to for years.

Premise and Premonition

Ellis: Nuova Magia

$39.95

If you haven't gotten this download yet, you should. If you've seen him perform before, you'll know that Giancarlo Scalia is an absolute powerhouse, and this collection of close-up material is some of his finest. There are easy tricks, tricks with sleight of hand, and everything in between. My favorite is his gimmickless Invisible Deck routine. (It doesn't require a stack to do, but if you do memdeck work, it is a stack safe, powerful opener that is perfect for strolling or stage performances.)

Nuova Magia

Nick: Pluck

$18.95

This is one of the go-to effects that I’ll perform if someone hands me a deck of cards. It always blows people away, feels incredibly fair and impossible. Christian has a very specific way of thinking about magic and mentalism, and this feels like a good example of that. The effect starts in the participant’s mind. They form a clear picture of what’s supposed to happen, and they feel like they understand where things are headed. Then the ending takes a turn they’re not expecting. It’s simple, clean, and consistently gets crazy reactions, which is why it’s one of my number one effects I perform with a deck of cards.

Pluck

Ellis: The Magic of Johnny Thompson

$249.95

When I first got these books, they were the most expensive books I'd ever bought. Johnny Thompson studied magic for longer than I've been alive. I'd be a fool to not study what he left behind. When I'm working on a new card effect, my first stop is to check these books and see if Johnny had any work on it. (I highly recommend his Pump Deck routine!) If you like the classics of magic, these books are a must have.

The Magic of Johnny Thompson

Nick: Cryptext 2.5:

$34.95

Cryptext is such a versatile tool. I’ve used it in all kinds of settings, including as a closer for paid gigs, and it always fries people. The prediction is sitting in plain sight the entire time, right in front of everyone. It’s a really clean way to reveal a word that feels personal to the audience, whether that’s the name of their company or a specific word you’ve chosen. I love combining it with a Toxic Force or Chronoforce Pro, where a completely “random” number is generated and then revealed to have been predicted in advance. You flip the prediction over, and the upside-down numbers spell out a word. It’s something I think every mentalist or magician should at least seriously consider working into their set.

Cryptext 2.5

Ellis: Having a community of magicians is so important for growing in magic. It’s important for a few reasons. Magicians give different feedback than laypeople do. Sure, a layperson might tell you if you flash, but a magician might tell you the method isn’t good enough, or that the scripting needs to be tighter, or any number of issues that a layperson isn’t trained to see. You don’t have to agree with their feedback, but being questioned by other magicians helps you think things through. Plus, they’ll be interested in different things, which can open your eyes to more great magic.

Nick: Method doesn’t matter nearly as much as presentation. It’s easy for magicians to fixate on the cleanest possible method, but lay audiences don’t experience magic that way. If I perform an ACAAN where someone names a card and number and deals to it themselves, or I deal and control their card to their named number, the effect feels the same to them. The trade-offs we worry about usually go unnoticed to laypeople. The real holy grail is how the magic feels, not how it works.

What are some of your hobbies besides magic?

Ellis: I'm supposed to have other hobbies? Jokes aside, I really enjoy going on hikes with my dog, playing guitar, watching TV, and rock climbing (though I'm not very good at it yet!)

Nick: I enjoy working out, gaming (Mostly CS2 right now), creating content for YouTube, and playing guitar.

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