Greg
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« Reply #46 on: October 03, 2011, 10:22:57 am » |
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We ran polls on different types of merchandise, and people really liked a couple of shirt designs- Not Pants, and the "I punched a zombie in the face..." shirt. Unfortunately, we were unable to get the 'punched' shirt design made in a satisfactory manner, and the Not Pants shirt didn't sell at all when we introduced it to the store. There were a grand total of three sales, so we wound up pulling it- it just wasn't economical to manufacture at that point.
None of our suppliers could provide ladies' cut shirts for anything approaching a reasonable price, unless our order volume was in the hundreds of units, and our audience just doesn't support that. It's a real shame, because I know the female members of the audience would appreciate some better-fitting shirts, but we just can't sell anything like that number.
The Zombie Zodiac prints went about the same way- lots of positive feedback, but few actual sales. So Jenny has discontinued that series for now. You've got to figure; making a print design can take Jenny up to 20 hours, so if only 5 people buy it, at $8.40, then she made $42 for 20 hours of work, which comes out to $2.05 per hour. We've still got them in the store, though- we already produced them so we'll hope that they can sell over time.
The knives didn't get enough positive feedback to make; the cost of production was so high that the price probably scared off any actual customers.
That pretty much leaves the patches. We found a great new supplier for the patches, so we've gotten in a new shipment of Infected patches that are doing well. The curse of the Red Halo patch continues, though- continued production difficulties have pushed their delivery date to the 11th of October, and then we'll need to see if they actually look good, before we put them in the store. Even the supplier that has done so well with the Infected logo is having difficulties with that one. Our hopes are high, but we'll see if they can make the date. Cancel that! Just got word that this batch arrived early, and they are BEAUTIFUL. They're up in the store now- check these babies out!
As always we're still trying to develop and produce new items that people will enjoy having and want to own. Unfortunately, that development and prototyping cycle takes time and money, so we have to balance the losses from ones that do poorly against the gains from products that do well.
Currently we're working on the development of a pdf version of the book, which will have some unique artwork that is different from the print volume. And, of course, we're still trying to get the Red Halo patches to come out. We JUST got the patches done!
As we produce and test more things, we'll keep everyone posted through announcements under the comic. Today's post was actually going to be an announcement about the Red Halo patches, but the last batch came out wrong so- as I said above- that got pushed another few weeks.
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