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Busy May Things

Hi everyone!

I thought I’d have more time this week to send an update earlier on, but it’s been super busy between resting up for about two days since Taka and I both got our boosters Monday afternoon. I figured we’d have some side effects, but I also thought “I’m tough, it won’t be as bad as last shot.” 😅 oh, the achy joints and injection spot pain! I’d say it knocked us out for two days, but really it was hard for us to sleep because of the achiness and semi-feverish sweating, so I’d say we had weird schedule of pass out from sleepiness, wake up in pain and unable to pass out for a while, but too much pain to do any work, sorta cycle. 🙃

Anyway, by Wednesday evening I’d say I was back on track and finished up packing up everyone’s packages if they had Wicked Lady, Chibimoon, Princess Serenity or the Sakura designs. I dropped all remaining packages off on Thursday, so a lot of you should have gotten packages or will be probably around Monday.

 

ABOUT LUNA REMAKES

So, I do have some semi-bad news. Great news is Luna came in and looks great and accurate! Bad news is I guess there was a miscommunication between my manu and I when I asked for remakes. I told them I needed a minimum of 75 Collector grades of Luna, “so please make 150 pieces.” I always order at least double what I need to account for about 30% of orders being B-grades so I can guarantee you all who support our pin club the Collector grades. Well, I guess they Cherry-picked my message and just sent me only 75 pins. 😑 so needless to say, I only was able to send out 50 pins of the remakes (the rest are standards or B-grades).

Unfortunately, that does mean some of you still won’t have Luna remakes yet and I’m so sorry to make you wait longer for her. I’ve already placed an order to get more of her made out of pocket. I could have argued they needed to remake the other 200+ remakes for free for me since technically that order was that many originally when they messed up, but I try to avoid conflict with our manu as much as possible. I also felt if I’m paying for a “restock” they won’t drag their feet remaking them like they tend to do when I ask for remakes (hello 9 months for remakes on Wicked Lady). Again, anyone who is still waiting for her, I do apologize for making you wait once again, but I am certain she will turn out good since she did this time around. So, if anyone was wondering why I didn’t drop extras of her despite having received her this month, that’s why. As always, there are extras of the light variant up in the secret shop only if you want those. I’ll also add the corrected dark versions to the secret shop if anyone wants standards or b-grades of her.

 

FOR MUGEN CLUB MEMBERS

You may have noticed for the March box the sticker sheet was missing. That’s because after so much fuss with my cricut machine ever since I got it 2 yrs back, im just done. Absolutely done with it. I always make our sticker sheets from home, but I’m gonna just say goodbye to that headache of a machine (if y’all have a cricut you know what I mean) and throw in the towel. I waste more money on ink, sticker paper and time trying to get cut lines to be semi-accurate, plus you can’t cut on glossy paper with a cricut unless you try a million hacks that maaaaaybe work. So from now on I’ll be ordering all my sticker sheets which will be sadly more cost-ineffective and require me to design the sticker sheets months in advance, so I hope you all don’t mind waiting for those sticker sheets in a future box. I do apologize for that and added some imported Japanese candy as a consolation for now. 🙃

 

OTHER BORING BUSINESS STUFF

Besides all that, not much else to report. Been keeping busy all month with pin grading, packing orders, and prepping for events we’ve been attending weekly this month. So my schedule has more or less been like:

MON-THURS: Grade pins, put on backing cards, ship shop orders

FRI: Prep for whatever event we are doing each weekend, that can be making prints, updating event inventory (and consequently website inventory)

SATURDAY: All our events have been on Saturdays this month, so wake up earlier than I’d like, set up table, sell the things, tear down, eat some food, take a shower and pass out.

SUNDAY: sleep in and lay in bed aching a couple hours 😂, pack weekend orders

But with my due diligence (and making sure to bring bags of pins with me to events when it’s slow) I’m finally pretty much caught up with all my workspace. I got all pins organized from the past few months (some restocks hadn’t been put on backing cards) and my inventory shelves are nearly full. So much so I may have to order a third giant storage shelf cause we keep pumping out pins. 🙈 did you know we have made 60 pretty winkers?! 😱 and for originals I think we have around 50 designs, and around 15 or 20 other fandom or random pins. And these aren’t even including variants or things that are sold out! So needless to say, I need some more storage unless I can clear out some of the pins (y’all know what to do 😂🛍).

 

SOME SKETCHES 👀

At last, some sketches of fandoms that are NOT SM. Can’t say when this will be made into vectors since still being sketched and we will be doing other characters too, but I can say I’ll be spending the downtime between when I arrive in Boston before the convention and after working on plenty of vectors of finished designs for both pin club designs next month and non-pin club designs. I’m hoping to make June a very fun month for y’all since it’s my birthday month! ♥️


MANU UPDATES

Finally, no updates from manu since the last post, but as I said again, I suspect I’ll be getting another giant package around the time I’m back from Boston.

Ok, that’s all for now, gonna go do all my last minute prep for the event next weekend since I won’t be able to prep at my family’s place. Wish me luck as I table alone for the first time without Taka. 🥲

- Mandy & Taka

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