This is part three of an ongoing blog post series on the experience of creating an indie deck. Follow these links for part one and two.
Originally I was going to write about the Kickstarter next. However, something else has come up since. We sold out of our first run of 1,500 decks! On the whole that's great, but it does also come with its own challenges. When you are mass producing something, you can't just stock up in tens, or even hundreds. There is often a substantial minimum order quantity. So restocking amounts is quite an expensive ordeal that comes with somewhat of a risk. What if people don't want to buy the deck anymore and you've just bought another thousand copies?
I don't have a total solution to this problem. I don't think any business does. But what we did do is launch a limited edition of our deck for pre-order. We're calling this edition the Ethereal deck. The hope is that this will be able to fund our next print run. That way at least if nobody wants to buy our deck anymore, we haven't gone into debt printing it!
The limited edition Ethereal deck is limited to fifty copies. Instead of the silver metallic foil print that the original has, this one has a hot pink print on it. It's not a huge difference, but it's enough to keep it fresh. I think that's what I'm getting at. Longevity is about finding new ways to frame your existing deck. To that end, we've also added two new products into the collector's bundle: a new, larger tarot pouch, and a glitter version of the Three of Swords pin. The pouch will be available outside of the bundle, but the pin is also limited to a print run of fifty, and is only available with the Ethereal deck.
That's another thing worth noting. Both of these products are the result of our customer's feedback. We were told that the last run of pouches was good, but slightly too tight, so we made them bigger and re-released them. The Three of Swords pin has been very popular and oft-requested. So we also re-released that.
At the time of writing this it's been one day since we released the deck and the Ethereal deck is already selling out! If you would like to support our work directly by funding our next print run, feel free to order your copy of the Ethereal bundle here. You never know, it might become an incredibly valuable collector's item one day ;)