I've been working on a thing, and I'm going to take a few minutes to talk about it here.
These are tentative plans, not set in stone yet, but representative of the general direction things are headed.
This will be a short thread.
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The idea is to use this quarterly subscription to help fund the initial production waves of each of our new toys. If we can get enough people (50 or so) signed up, we'll be able to release an average of one toy a month all year, with the initial production run funded by the fanclub.
In exchange for that, the vanguard gets 3 toys per quarter, with at least one of them in a fanclub exclusive color scheme or with fan club exclusive accessories or packaging, plus a monthly behind the scenes video, early access to comics and cartoons and video games and things of that nature, and your choice of new posters or t-shirts when they're available.
If enough folks are interested, I'll even set up a discord channel where we can chat about upcoming releases, and folks can vote on which characters (or lines) will make it into the next production wave.
We'll also do a kind of prototypes and one offs marketplace, where members can purchase pieces that didn't make it into production, or the early versions of pieces that did (like the original GIANT HEAD versions of our Mysterious Air Pirates keshi toys, of which we made 5 or 6 before adjusting to something we could produce more consistently.)
If this (12 original hand made toys a year + digital copies of all of our video games, comics, cartoons, and fiction, + your choice of poster or comic or game cartridge twice a year, + behind the scenes and maybe discord) seems like the kind of thing you might be into, let me know!
I'm still working out the details right now, and trying to figure out exactly how it'll all work, and I'm very open to feedback and discussion.
Right now, if we were to do one new toy per month, we could go for 3 years on just the designs we already have finished.
When we make a new toy, the biggest expense is in the production the metal molds that we use to produce the toys. These metal molds currently runs us between $250 and $1500 for each new toy (depending on the complexity of the parts and the number of parts in the toy.)
This is very cheap compared to the rest of the industry, where similar productions tend to start at around $10,000, and can easily reach the low six figures.
But it's a lot for our very small team to have invested in a new line, especially when we're not doing regular events to help fund production.
If we had a group of regular contributors who could offset or wholly cover those initial expenses, we could bring new designs out more quickly (and free up more attention and energy to build out our marketing materials and secondary media in order to get us to a fully sustainable production!)
The alternative I've considered is launching a quarterly crowdfunding campaign for each of our new toy lines.
The benefits are the same (early access, limited edition colorways, optional add ons, etc) but without the ongoing commitment (and, under the standard crowd funding setup, no one gets charged if we don't raise enough to do a full production run.
I'm not sure I like this, but I'm open to being convinced.
Early next year, we're going to roll out a fan club with a quarterly subscription.
I've been calling it the Vanguard of the Joyful Revolution. What do you think of the name?