News

So I'm not going to lie. I don't think we are going to make it. April has for the last 2 years been worried that we have been circling the drain but I've tried to remain optimistic and have not been willing to succumb to making that claim that we are on the way out, but for the first time in the nearly 5 years we have been doing this, I'm about at the point where I'm willing to concede to that notion.

We simply are not getting enough return business right now and our overhead for the cost of doing business is not being offset enough by our sales. We are still paying on a sizeable loan, scraping dollars together to pay for medium sized customer lots, rarely have enough funds to buy Japan lots, can barely pay ourselves minimum wage, have no hope whatsoever of generating enough funds to buy the final upcoming orders from our distributor and the business is being supplemented by the money I earn doing my Skyrim Modding projects, which is really not fair honestly. We get little to no interest with all the effort put into our YouTube channel and cannot seem to find a way to capitalize on growing a community and it all seems an exhausting waste of time.

I am now looking for alternate part time work and will continue to try and operate the chop shop as long as possible, but at this point, our personal finances are at risk of being dragged down so I'm not sure in all honestly how much longer I can deal with this. It's a grave disappointment. I'm going to press onward and continue to struggle through with CCS until the loan is paid off in the coming months and hope that once it is, things will rebound, but honestly I am not holding out a lot of hope at this point.

-Travis

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. 

As many of you who have been customers or followers of us for some time will know, things have been rough with our distributor relationship and the state of business due to the global economy at large and we've been doing everything we can to try and stay afloat and remain with our distributor but the truth is that we are not making enough sales to sustain the business in the way it stands currently. We had to scale back Dan a few months back, having him do some social media and video content creation instead while Travis picks back up with all order fulfillment but we have reduced our pay to such a low level in the last few months that April has had to pick back up working full time at her vet medicine job and remand all day to day operations to Trav and she will be focusing on some more steering roles and social media/video related tasks and when we do get larger supply orders in stock, jumping in to get new items listed and stuff split as quickly as possible with Trav's help.

Next month we will be making an announcement on a new affiliated Nendoroid hobby project that will help to grow the Nendoroid community and hopefully draw support to sustain the project efforts itself, grow the social media and YouTube channels and ultimately the Chop Shop business at large. A lot of exciting additions and features will be discussed as we move into diversifying our focus within the Nendoroid hobby. More on this in next month's newsletter.

As we have indicated in the past, our relationship with the distributor has been rough and we are trying to work out a deal that will preserve that relationship if possible, but ultimately allow us to shift our spending into areas that are actually generating business because right now they are a complete waste of time and money for our business and were it not for the fear of breaking our purchase agreement and having legal issues with severing ties, we would simply walk away from them today, but we are somewhat bound by a possible contract to continuing purchasing what we have pre-ordered and until that pool of items has been bought or negotiated down, we don't have much recourse.

If we do end up severing ties with the distributor, we have a plan in place for meeting all remaining customer preorders as quickly as possible and if not, arranging to credit or refund customers where necessary if items cannot be obtained. More on this in next month's newsletter.

We have also started an advertising campaign on YouTube and Google which will hopefully draw new attention to the business with text and video ads which will take a couple months to see if they are cost effective or just another sink of money we don't have. Initial analytics over the first few days has been promising however with a fair number of people clicking through to check out the site, so hopefully in time this will start translating to new sales. We do have a fairly healthy level of new customers every day and I hope these campaigns will drive even more.

From August 29th through September 3rd we will all be out of town for a much needed extended family vacation. This is in many ways the final hurrah on many levels from being the end of summer and high school school/college starting back up for our two boys, final excursion before April returns to full time at her other job and Dan takes on a new full time job elsewhere and Travis picks up all the daily Chop Shop reins full time, and a much needed break before we dive head long into our new Chop Shop related venture that will hopefully supplement what we do and drive some more interest ahead.

We will be having a live in house sitter guarding the home front/warehouse and taking care of the Guinea Pigs, cat and dog, but no order fulfillment will be done until September 4th, so please be aware that orders will be delayed if placed between August 28th and around September 6th as we catch up upon our return. We will be periodically checking in on emails and dealing with any critical concerns but general questions or special requests will not be addressed until we return.

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.