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.
Plans ahead
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.
Sell Your Stuff Resumed
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.
Check us out on Discord!
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.
We are currently once again offering cash and/or store credit for any Nendoroid part lots, whole boxed items or collections you have to offer. See the Sell Your Stuff page on the special services tab for details and to submit an offer request.
Since returning from vacation I've been sick (uhhg), and this week though feeling much more like myself I've lost my freakin' voice! So I'm having to push back the Saturday customization workshop another week to Saturday the 23rd at noon. Join me then as we rev back up and continue the projects.
We've restocked some grab bags which give you around $50-$60 worth of random overstock and clearance parts for only $25! Which is a huge value already for anyone looking for a variety of surprise parts or parts to customize or practice customizing on the cheap.
Now any time we restock a batch of grab bags, we will be including 1 random bonus higher value item in 1 out of 10 bags. These items will usually be popular hairs, vehicles like horses or motorcycles, preorder bonuses and much more. This initial batch will actually be getting an additional bonus item making your chances of getting a bonus item 15% instead of 10% on this initial run of bonus including grab bags.
Now through Friday at midnight (pacific time) we are doing 20% off all boxed items. This discount includes all sale items as well making those already great priced items a fantastic buy! Act now and save big.
Come by and subscribe to our YouTube channel and help support our efforts. Just by subscribing and watching a few vidoes you will be helping us edge towards monetization of our channel and helping us to obtain a new reliable revenue stream. The YouTube channel is getting updated 3 times each week currently as we provide the following:
Tuesday/Wednesday - April's weekly Shop, Hobby and Industry update.
Saturday - Trav's weekly nendoroid customization workshop live stream.
Sunday - Dan's weekly part swap live stream.
We additionally intend on producing additional content such as many many more unboxing videos to add to the library as well as many more instructional videos pertaining to the hobby at large.
Status updates
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.
Order Delays - Upcoming Vacation
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.
Check us out on Discord!
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.
At the bottom of the website is a drop down menu that will allow you to change the currency products will be shown in. It had been down and out for awhile but is now repaired.
This Saturday (Aug 5th) at noon pacific time, come join Trav live on YouTube as he embarks to customize anime-inspired renditions of characters from "The Wizard of OZ" illustrating a variety of techniques, tools and materials for building custom Nendoroids. Gather up your own projects as you tune in and ask questions as you work along and Trav will try and give some good advice from a lifetime of model building, miniature painting and kit bashing of a variety of projects. See our "customizing 101" video (https://youtu.be/pjzpHT9viAU) ahead of the live stream for a good overview of various tools and materials that will be featured and utilized during the stream so you can stock on up needed items for your own projects.
Effective immediately, we will no longer honor cancellations or edits to any Hold Orders once the items have been pulled for your cache. If there are items you no longer want in your Hold Orders, you are welcome to follow the standard return process and we'll issue a credit or refund as appropriate for any returned items, less the 10% restocking fee. Making edits to existing cache orders is problematic and given how the back end of the inventory system works, it's just cleaner and easier for us to handle them like any other return rather than editing existing orders. Sorry for any inconvenience and hope you understand our dilemma . Any questions on the matter, feel free to reach out.
Secondly just a reminder that ALL PACKAGES now include up to $100 of insurance on First class, and up to $200 on priority mail packages if you opt to purchase priority. If your order is worth more than $200 we highly recommend purchasing the insurance addon which can be found on every product page as a suggested upsell item. This $3 item will cover orders for up to $500 for each quantity of the insurance you purchase. So if you order is worth $350, buy it once, if it's $620, buy it twice and the total value is covered.
In short you do not need to purchase the insurance if your order is less than $100 on first class, or less than $200 if shipping by Priority mail.
From the latest Chibi Chop Shop newsletter, comes an article about the state of the nendoroid industry and small businesses like Chibi Chop Shop.
News came down this week that Connexe Toys has gone out of business. This retailer focused on Nendoroid sales and was even a source for us for a few items. I'm not sure how their company was set up and if they were a brick and mortar store or purely an online one, or how large they were, but my impression is that they were a small business and seeing any small business have to shut down is a massive shame.
I want to take a moment and appeal to you, the customer base and implore you, in fact no, BEG you to stop preordering items or in fact ordering items direct from Good Smile Company at all and instead bring your business to small business retailers such as us, or companies like the now out of business Connexe Toys. Your business can save failing shops like these.
Good Smile Company owns the distributor in the US, and they have been engaging in frankly unethical practices of undercutting their own retailers by selling their products on their own site for less than we can even BUY them for in many cases. This is scummy frankly and GSC should be ashamed and should be making every effort to direct customers to their partner stores if not ALL stores in general that sell their products. Instead they offer preorders direct from the source meaning NOBODY gets them faster, and even offer little bonuses to lure you in. Those little extras along with lack of patience in getting your Nendo items leads to less people placing preorders with retailers, even though GSC REQUIRES us to offer them in order to be a partner store. I fail to see really what "partnership" benefit they even offer other than a link buried on their confusing website.
Most retailers are stopping preorders altogether with GSC (ourselves included), and it would be a better support for the industry at large to support small business and simply buy items off the shelf or online rather than relying on preordering. It used to be that preordering was the only way to guarantee a copy of a figure you wanted, but as GSC has been vastly expanding over the last couple years, supply is not a problem. In fact we have surplus of most product on hand but nobody to sell it to because folks want it now and give their money direct to Good Smile.
The only saving grace is that we are a split item shop first and foremost and frankly whole product matters very little to us with the small discount we get after you factor all their extra fees and shipping they charge us. We prefer buying collections, importing large lots from Japan, and buying a few figures here and there from various other sellers to maximize our selection diversity. Right now we are sitting on mountains of whole product with little hope of needing to split them and trying our damnedest to liquidate them on some other outside market platforms, but that also costs us another 11-15% in fees, making most sales of those items a loss.
Since GSC's distributor decided to require full case purchases just for the sake of their own convenience, our business has been shrinking because our product diversity has dropped and most money is committed to buying their ever growing influx of new items by the case full, which we are stuck honoring from about a year ago on, due to the hideous preordering model the nendoroid hobby works under. Basically it required us to foresee the future of our business and we didn't foresee a pandemic and post pandemic recession, and they have no forgiveness for those facts which have shrunk the business by about 30% vs last year.
June was probably the worst sales month we have had in about 2 years. June is typically pretty slow since it marks the start of summer time and school getting out, graduations, family trips and the like, but we usually survive through it without much trouble. This year was much harder and it doesn't look that great moving forward into July. We seriously are going to have to consider cancelling several items from the distributor which were over ordered back when the business was estimated to be able to support it, and lose about 20% of the cost of those items, which is honestly a LOT of money, but if it frees us to be able to put 75% of our funds back into other sources, it will be a benefit in the long run.
Right now we are continuing to tread water and striving to expand our name and pay the bills and stay open, but every day is becoming a struggle since around November of last year. We're looking for any means to push product, expand our presence and grow the brand, but it's challenging to say the least.
I know this sounds a bit like a blogger complaining about their work day, but we think it provides valuable insight into the nendoroid industry at large and how the status quo practices affect real small family businesses like ours and presumably, like Connexe Toys.
