September News

So finally after about 2 years of back and forth I have just finished negotiating things with the distributor's new sales manager and things are finally going to be getting some forward progress.

As many of you know we have for the last two years been struggling with our distributor for a number of reasons which have lead to a lot of delays in preorder items arriving to us, which have been largely beyond our control, so we have made the following new arrangement with our distributor.

All remaining items which we have preorders owed to customers, will be grouped together into a few batches of shipments by the distributor and will be shipping out to us soon. This will allow us to finalize all remaining preorders in short course. They are currently re-packing these orders for us and I have no definitive timetable as of yet, but I expect we'll have some of the orders on the way to us before the end of the year and hope that we'll be getting some of these items at least shipped out in time for Christmas.

All other items we had on order with the distributor, both pending shipment and future preorders have been cancelled and we will no longer be placing preorders with the distributor. Instead we are going to buy directly from their excess on hand stock.

This does sadly mean that we will have less new stock available, it will limit what we can get from them, and doll product will be much harder for us to get a hold of, but on the flip side of this, it will allow us the opportunity to once again focus on purchasing customer lots, collections, import lots, and close out product much more frequently which is what we built our business on over the first 2.5 years of fast growth. This will mean a much greater diversity of restocks moving forward.

Since we are effectively scaling back to where business was a couple of years ago, April has reduced hours and we've cut Dan out of active hours. This means that Trav (me) will be handling the vast majority of the business and April will be assisting with pulling order for me now and then as needed, listing and photographing new items and restocking split parts from loose items since identifying parts on sight is her super power and all I can usually do is say "Um yeah I've seen that hair before". So it's very helpful if you are selling us a lot, to pack the item together by figure and label the number on it so I can handle it.

Beyond this shift in staffing and job tasks, we are going to still be focusing on trying to drive our YouTube channel to the point where we are able to monetize by providing weekly content and periodic additional featured content. As mentioned in the past we are doing a weekly "April's Vlog" about shop, industry and hobby news and a weekly featured stream (currently my Nendoroid Customization Workshop on YouTube). Additionally we hope to produce more carefully curated content that features a variety of tips and advice for how to get the most out of your nendoroid hobby with videos such as introduction to the hobby, more guides on repairs and cleaning and customizing, MANY more unboxings, and more.

We also have plans for the future to develop an adjunct project to Chibi Chop Shop which will be funded by a Patreon channel which will hopefully drive more community engagements, tie in with our discord server and YouTube content and drive more business to the shop. We hope to provide a number of interesting services in the future, but bear in mind we are still in the brainstorming stages of this project and so results may vary but are more than happy to hear any suggestions you might have.

In a nutshell we want to provide even more information for nendoroid hobbyists by providing an archive of scanned instruction booklets for every Nendoroid possible! Who better than us to be in a position to provide this?

In addition to this we want to flesh out the information found on our nendoroid master list by providing info about stands, skin tone and much more.

Finally our "pie in the sky" concept will be to create a new nendoroid collector app which will list every nendoroid, provide official GSC photos, link to a search result page on Chibi Chop Shop showing available parts, a link to our instruction booklet archive, bootleg info when applicable, link to our YouTube unboxing video for that figure when available, and all other info such as character name, IP, skin tone, and more. The app will be able to let you check off figures on the list or to create lists of figures to track your haves and wants. The idea will be for the app to be free but be ad supported for the general public, while patreon supporters will be given a code to unlock the app to remove ads. This project idea is ambitious and will be a slow development as I learn what is needed. I've done a variety of different types of programing over the years, with script writing for games being my most prominent achievement so I know if I can put in the effort, it's something I can eventually achieve. Alternately if the popularity of this idea takes off, Patreon and/or Kickstarter could potentially fund hiring a professional to build the framework for the app and I would merely have to do the data entry for it to build the database. Either way though it's an ambitious project that I think could be greatly worthwhile.

We have been offering only store credit for purchases from customers but have just re-opened the option for cash payments. Additionally I have updated the Sell Your Stuff page (see link at the bottom of this newsletter), to reflect a clearer guide on how we roughly price loose parts.

Realistically we will be making cash offers up to $1000 based on the size of lots but we are going to be more selective on what the lots contain and will devalue any items that are saturated in the market or are overstocked already with us. Any highly desired items or things we are out of stock of will have higher priority and get higher offers.

Once our preorders are fulfilled by the distributor in the coming months we will once again have cash flow available to make much larger purchases in the $10K or more range, but until then we are still limiting purchasing to moderate and smaller lots of less that $1000.

Come help our community grow! Our recently launched Discord server is growing and we want your involvement. Come by and talk to other Nendo enthusiasts, share your customs or learn about customization and engage with us in real time!

Click the button below or follow this link to check it out. Also share this around to any other nendoroid related communities you might be part of and help grow the server.