A Peek into 2023!
Happy Holiday Season, everyone!
I hope you're all taking some time to relax, enjoy some time with loved ones, and do some self-care as we draw to the close of 2022! Now that I've wrapped up all my events for the year last weekend, I've had lots of time to sleep, sleep some more, crank out an entire Lunar New Year pin collection, (finally) start binging SpyxFamily (do we need a winking Anya pin?), and have a couple shows lined up with some friends for Christmas eve & the eve of New Year's eve. I'm really looking forward to a pretty quiet January where I can focus on sketching, new ideas and some me time.
Since I mostly want to be positive in this post, let's get the sort of bad news out of the way first.
the not-so-fun stuff
I know I said I'd be doing pre-orders for Princess Jupiter & Venus, but unfortunately, our main manufacturer rep has had Covid and been fairly MIA (understandably so—it really knocked me out when I got it), on top of being a new dad in the last month or so. So I haven't been able to get a quote for those pins yet. While I plan to sell them at the same price as Mercury, I want to be certain about cost before opening pre-orders. I also don't want to take anyone's pre-order money until I have personally paid for the pins. I don't know if you all are aware, but Taka and I have always had a rule to pay out of our pocket before we take pre-order money. So even if we do allow pre-orders, we still pay for production before we even open pre-orders. This is to guarantee if we ever had to refund, we could be able to do so.
While I'm always accepting of their excuses, to be honest, I'm starting to work with my back up manu more recently. Despite being loyal to our main rep for 4 years, I feel he has become too relaxed on getting my orders to me on time, which in turn affects the turnaround time I send pins to you all. While I have always been grateful for the amount of patience the pin community has, it honestly isn't fair that my manu's failure to ship in a timely manner keeps you all from getting your pins in a decent amount of time. It's also not fair to me to have to grade 2-3 months of pins in a short period rather than just 1 month of pins at a time.
Despite paying him $800 for shipping the first week of this month, I have seen no sign of the pins leaving the factory. I know he's not ghosting me or stealing our money, but the fact is I think because I've always been gentle and forgiving of their oversights/excuses, that they're sort of becoming too relaxed with me about when they send finished pins. Queen Serenity & Queen Beryl were finished by mid-October and they didn't bother to send them with the last package. As far as my last update too, it looked like Jadeite, Star Fighter were finished, with Zoisite & Star Healer only needing screen printing. The fact is, I know my manufacturer is not that slow as far as actual production time, but I think my rep is just waiting to bundle 2-3 months of pins at a time instead of sending when complete which I don't really understand why since I pay by the weight of the package when they are ready to send them out.
With all the manufacturers closing up for about 10-14 days in January/February, I honestly need someone with a faster turnaround time and high quality. My secondary rep is in fact faster and usually less B-grades, but they are a bit more pricey and adventurous when it comes to designs, which is why I use them less. That said, I do plan to use them for our originals and Ghibli Winker Club starting in January. For consistency in quality and to keep all our SM Pretty Winkers in continuity, I will keep using my main manu, but if communication with my rep starts to drop, I'll be using them less.
the fun stuff
ok, so onto the happier news! Let's talk about all the upcoming designs! First off, here's the finished Princess Jupiter Design.
As always, I can't decide if I like the anime or manga variant more! >_< good thing I'm the creator so I can keep one of each! :p As I mentioned in the last post, we'll be lowering the LE to 75 for the remaining princesses (minus maybe Serenity since she'll undoubtedly be the most popular). I should have the finished vector for Venus & may as well wrap up Mars too since it's already almost January. So expect a handful of preorders once I get word from our manu that he's all better from Covid.
Outside of these, I'm also really excited to unveil what I worked hard on all week:
Another collection of designs created by me, Mandy, entirely from start to finish! As many of you may have seen over the years, I do an annual collaboration with 4 other artists, which is why I've never completed the full collection of Zodiac animals. Without getting into detail or calling anyone out, however, in the past 4 years of doing this collab, myself and another collaborator have felt that the majority of the project falls on us to organize, create graphics, run the KS, fulfill, etc.. Both of us decided rather than initiate the planning for 2023, we'd wait to see if anyone broached the subject of continuing the project and since no one has, we are moving forward on our own, which to be honest, I'm very happy about because it means I can do the entire collection in one go.
The lunar new year animals have been especially popular at in person events for me with me being nearly sold out of tigers from this year (which um, I didn't even realize I never even listed on the website until a week ago..) So I'm really happy to get this collection into production hopefully in time for LNY. I actually have like 3 Lunar New Year events I'll be vending at in Jan/February. We'll see if that actually happens since that's less than a month away and many factories will close before that. If it's not possible, I'm thinking I'll run a Kickstarter for this project as that always brings some new followers than my own social media reach can attain.
I'm really proud of this collection as it still stays true to the style I had for the previous designs, but I think looks even better since it looks even more true to the little porcelain/ceramic figurines that the Japanese display at New Year. I'm hoping these will also be popular for our wholesale accounts as well. I haven't touched on that topic in a while, but we've been getting into a few museums and shops here in Washington and Hawaii!
2023 Club Themes
in 2023, we'll be doing 3 clubs which will certainly be a lot of work, but I think my workflow has improved a lot as I had to balance more events and the usual work. As my vectoring skills have also improved, I'm able to whip out more designs than before. Not to say it's not still a lot of work, but being able to reduce my time by about 30-40% to vector leaves me more time to create more which I'm so excited about.
Pretty Winkers: Sailor Moon
Taka will be still handling all the SM Pretty Winkers, though we will be mainly doing villains and a couple side characters in 2023 as we're nearing completion of almost all the main characters. In all likelihood, we'll be wrapping up the SM Pretty Winkers line by the end of this year. By no means does that mean we won't still make fan art for my favorite series, but it will likely be the end of this series. That's a big reason why I also decided to start up the next Pretty Winker collection.
Taka will be still handling all the SM Pretty Winkers, though we will be mainly doing villains and a couple side characters in 2023 as we're nearing completion of almost all the main characters. In all likelihood, we'll be wrapping up the SM Pretty Winkers line by the end of this year. By no means does that mean we won't still make fan art for my favorite series, but it will likely be the end of this series. That's a big reason why I also decided to start up the next Pretty Winker collection.
Pretty Winkers: Ghibli
As we begin this collection, I will be the one handling this club entirely from sketching, illustrating and vectoring. Ghibli has a more simple style than Naoko's intricate manga style, so I feel comfortable taking on an extra task for this club. That's not to say the designs will be less detailed or boring—I fully intend to add a touch of art nouveau that we've come to be known for in our Pretty Winkers, as well as little details we like to sneak in for the hardcore fans! I plan on of course doing the main characters of the most favorite films, but I'll also be pretty self-indulgent and be doing side characters or favorites even if they're less popular films. I imagine this club won't have quite as loyal a following of die-hard collectors as the SM club since Ghibli fans tend to pick-and-choose from only their favorite films. And that's fine, at the end of the day, I wouldn't make a fan art if I didn't have passion or true interest in it.
As we begin this collection, I will be the one handling this club entirely from sketching, illustrating and vectoring. Ghibli has a more simple style than Naoko's intricate manga style, so I feel comfortable taking on an extra task for this club. That's not to say the designs will be less detailed or boring—I fully intend to add a touch of art nouveau that we've come to be known for in our Pretty Winkers, as well as little details we like to sneak in for the hardcore fans! I plan on of course doing the main characters of the most favorite films, but I'll also be pretty self-indulgent and be doing side characters or favorites even if they're less popular films. I imagine this club won't have quite as loyal a following of die-hard collectors as the SM club since Ghibli fans tend to pick-and-choose from only their favorite films. And that's fine, at the end of the day, I wouldn't make a fan art if I didn't have passion or true interest in it.
Japanese Traditional Club: Animals
2023 we will be doing Japanese traditional animals! We worried this theme might feel redundant since I'm doing a whole zodiac collection to kick off the year, but we decided the style will be very different, plus mostly different animals. While we will make sure it's fairly cute, it will still have a more ukiyo e vibe without being too realistic. Striking a balance of kawaii and traditional will be a challenge, but one I have no doubt Taka can easily do it.
2023 we will be doing Japanese traditional animals! We worried this theme might feel redundant since I'm doing a whole zodiac collection to kick off the year, but we decided the style will be very different, plus mostly different animals. While we will make sure it's fairly cute, it will still have a more ukiyo e vibe without being too realistic. Striking a balance of kawaii and traditional will be a challenge, but one I have no doubt Taka can easily do it.
Other Projects
We did consider replacing our Japanese traditional club with a club of only original characters since some of you requested it as a theme when we sent out our questionnaire a few months ago. Taka has been on a kick of drawing our current original characters, as well as a bunch of new characters, and while we probably could fill out a whole year's worth of our OCs, we felt we need to flesh them out some more and also build a bigger following of those characters before we really launch a club for them. Maybe in 2024! But in the meantime, we'll be working on more and more merch of our original characters this upcoming year.
Besides our OCs, we also want to give our Japanese traditional fans more of what they want—yokai! We are likely going to go the Kickstarter route and do some mini KS projects throughout the year. As one of our main goals this next year is to expand our following, we are thinking of using KS as a marketing tool to broaden our fanbase. Yes, they do take a percentage of your earnings, but honestly no more than we already pay to do in person events. If 2022 was my experimental year for IRL events, 2023 will be my year of experimental marketing online! :p To go along with the yokai I will also be creating an aswang collection, which is the Filipino version of mythological creatures. If you are interested in that, I highly recommend checking out the anime Trese which Netflix released at the end of 2021!
That's a wrap!
Ok, that's all I have for today. I will have another post before the end of the year (which is only a week away!) to reveal the other Sailor Princesses, designs for January, and probably an update on when pre-orders will open and if I'll be doing a LNY Zodiac Kickstarter or not.
As always, thank you all for your patience, support, and in many cases, friendship! We truly adore this community we've been able to be part of and we look forward to continuing to create in the new year with your support and encouragement. In the meantime, stay warm, safe and have a lovely holiday week!
- Mandy & Taka
@Moosecat: Oh some of those are already on my still long list of characters. We probably wouldn’t do any live action stuff just because it’s not something I ever got into, but could consider the prototypes. And ummm well, we weren’t planning to do Phobos & deimos in one design, but maaaybe (as in definitely) planning to do Phobos/Deimos individually (different poses) at same months as Cyprine/Ptitol. o.o Also considered doing the priestesses who serve Helios, though they kinda just look like Usagi & Queen Serenity combined. haha
@Eden: I’m year of the snake but don’t particularly love snakes so I really tried to make it cute! And duly noted on the second opinions for some of moosecat’s ideas! :p
Oooh if you got into Spy x Family too then I would 100% buy an Anya pin from you! (actually I would buy Yor and Loid too now that I think of it haha)
I absolutely adore the Princess Jupiter and LNY designs ! I myself am an Horse sign but I’d say the Snake is my favorite, it’s looking so adorable and playful 💖 I’m really excited about all the new designs incoming, and can’t wait to see what you’ll bring to us all next year, even though I already know it will be awesome ! (oh and by the way I wanted to second @moosecat’s suggestions, especially the Prototype Senshi because I’ve thought so many times how I would love a prototype Sailor Moon with her mask and pink hair from you guys haha! but not to force you or anything, it’s just a thought 💗🌙)
I hope you will have a great and happy holiday week, stay safe and warm ! ✨
Oops I forgot to add a couple from the live action: Princess Sailor Moon and Dark Mercury!
In case you need suggestions for additional SM chars: Sailor V, Sailor Luna (from live action but based on Naoko’s concept art), Galaxia but in her dress/hair down, Phobos/Deimos (I wonder if they’d be possible in a single pin?), Guardian Cosmos, Kousagi/Parallel SM, Prototype Senshi!
Super looking forward to the Ghibli club too! 💖