We're almost through April which means we've pretty much survived our second Kickstarter and finished shipping Snowblind our second* custom dice set as the April dice subscription theme. This kickstarter was not without its challenges as we ran into a mold problem with the d6 in the snowblind set that required getting new dice made and repacking each set. So if you are wondering why your snowblind set was packed in a paper envelope rather then the standard factory packing that's why. That said we've survived the process and we continue to grow at a solid pace. We are busy working on our future custom limited edition sets with the aim of launching about one limited edition set every two months going forward. We've also started making our custom dice available for direct purchase once all dice subscribers have received a set. We still have a handful of 'Hawaiian Sunset' available if you want a set.
To give you a sense of what is coming up in the subscription the next set we ship will be Purple Haze which is as the name implies a hazy purple set. It is a standard production set so not a limited Libris Arcana exclusive but still pretty awesome. We've got 500 of these in the queue so they will almost certainly not last a full month. Depending on the timing we will either launch another standard set or our next custom set 'Pride' (a mixed rainbow set) at that point. We are aiming to do about 13 sets per year but as the design and manufacture process takes time we will always struggle with ordering too few dice for the subscription. Obviously we could order more but the risk of getting stuck with unsold inventory is not one we can take as a small business.
In other inventory challenges we are considering halting a few of our book subscription offerings. We have already closed the US version of the book subscription to new sign ups as it has become very difficult to find enough inventory to keep up with demand. We started out selling books so it isn't a decision we want to take but we are also committed to keeping quality high so if needed we will shut down the book subscription offerings. It might seem odd for a growing business to be reducing their product count but we only have so much time in the day and we need to focus on the highest value products.
In terms of new product development we have some bad news to report there as well. We ran the numbers on the advent calendar kickstarter and simply couldn't make it work. It isn't that it is a bad idea if someone wants to do it but it isn't a sure thing and we need to remain focused on the areas where we are growing to make sure we don't mess them up and right now that's the dice subscription. Taking on the work of another kickstarter is not in the cards right now.
That said we are very committed to helping out other kickstarters so if you have an idea your working on let us know. We're happy to drive some traffic your way or if your doing some cool dice we can use our subscription to buy a chunk of inventory from you and help drop your manufacturing cost significantly. To that end we have a couple collaborations in the cards with up and coming manufacturers that we hope to be able to talk about very soon.
John
*(actually the first we designed but shipped second cause reasons)
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