Princess Dropping, Travel Insights + More!

Good Evening, everyone!

We are back from our venture to Austin, TX for a couple days this week.

THE RESULTS ARE IN!

Thank you all who gave feedback on the Princess designs. The vast majority (92% of y'all) wanted to keep the new Princess Collection starting with Mrcry in the smaller range of 3" which I am glad to hear because that means we can keep costs lower while still having something pretty, bigger than our usual pins, and exclusive to the club. These pins, like our Cosmos design will be a single run with a back stamp! :)

I'm going to open up the preorders for this on Sunday at noon (12pm PST). The original variant will be LE65 and the pastel "manga" variant will be LE35. I am limiting the guaranteed A-Grades of the original variant to 15 and the manga variant to 5. I will then have the remaining preorder spots as mixed grade which means you very well could get an A-Grade, Standard or B-Grade. It's absolutely possible we will get more than 15 A-Grade pins *fingers crossed*, but as we all know, the bigger the pin, the higher chance for mistakes, too. I'll put in a slightly discounted mixed grade bundle for those of you who want to snag both. :) I'll leave pre-orders up til November 3rd.

Below you can see that I added a little glitter to her hair accessory and her necklace pendant. There will also be glitter in the lighter edges of the bellflower with solid screenprint for the darker colors. I thought this would give it just a subtle glint as though the edges of the bellflower had dewdrops.

Also for feedback on the original designs, I was surprised how evenly spread out your opinions are. Majority of you loved the animal theme for 2023 as our originals club, but that only barely outbeat going back to Yokai/Aswang theme and surprisingly you all also seem to be interested in more of our original characters. This is really heartwarming for us because we truly love our original characters and yokai a lot! And for the optional feedback, of course many of you want us to continue Pretty Soldiers, though I think that goes without saying that we aren't planning to quit that content anytime soon. I don't remember if I said it here or in stories on IG, but we easily have enough characters to keep the Pretty Winkers going til March 2024 without repeating any characters, so no worries there! And as we mentioned a month or two ago, we are indeed planning to add SG Pretty Winkers beginning in January. I was certainly glad to also see many of you wanting some classics like YYH, and other magical girls. I'm going to try my darnedest to make this all happen in the new year. Since I'll be stepping back from doing as many pop-ups in January-March, I want to focus my own time on doing more artwork for pins, prints and other merch both original and my personal favorite fandoms (which thankfully are a lot of your fav fandoms too).

REGARDING AUSTIN, TX

For those of you who are interested in our trip to Austin, we had a really lovely time exploring it. It was overall a fairly random trip where we didn't make too many plans other than meeting with a couple lovely pin club members, going to a small theme venue with a rage room and ax-throwing, and then Wonderspaces, an interactive gallery. We had a really great time and honestly, we really want to move to Austin. That said, we decided despite us really liking the vibe, the people, the food, and the roads in Austin (yes, the roads because we love night drives and Taka is really wishing to have a chance to ride his motorcycle more), we are going to plan on staying in Seattle for at least another year.

The move was going to be more for Taka's business than for Shishido Creative, and unfortunately we just don't feel that Austin will have enough for Taka's target market to justify this move just yet.

While Taka is happy to tattoo anyone who has respect for the traditional Japanese tattooing method (tebori), we find it's already hard enough to find clients who are committed to not only getting larger traditional pieces, but also having the money to spend on it. Although so many people have told us that Austin has a lot of tattooed people, to be honest, we didn't see very many tattooed people despite exploring so many areas both in the day and night. That's not to say they're not there as there's certainly enough tattoo shops and young money coming into Austin, but it doesn't even come close to comparison to the amount of tattooed people we see in the Northwest from all age groups and walks of life.

While Taka's target audience isn't specifically Asians, there is a higher tendency for Asian and mixed POC customers that want to get something that represents their culture by someone who is also a POC and/or Asian. Something I never realized until Taka came into my life was that there aren't actually a lot of Asian tattoo artists in the West, of course hugely due to stigma of tattoo in AAPI homes—you can guess how many AAPI kids say "my family would disown me if I got a tattoo" but in the end I always remind people that in general if something as outward and shallow as a tattoo could make someone stop loving you, is it really worth it to try to please them? Both Taka and I have families that have no qualms talking about how much they hate tattoos, but we still aren't disowned, so we always say that it's your body to do with as you see fit. :p

As the overall income threshold of Seattlites is higher, this also means more expendable income for luxury items like tattoos because at the end of the day, tattoos are still a luxury and are not necessary to live. Taka doesn't generally do single session or flash work, so clients must be able to commit to at least 2-5 sessions in general. For large pieces like full sleeves, back pieces, etc, Taka's average customer usually gets around 40-70 hours of work done and recently Taka has been getting a lot more inquiries for large pieces in Seattle and we wouldn't feel right moving away in the middle of their tattoo progress without the guarantee that we could afford to come back to Seattle at least quarterly. If we moved in January like we thought we might, we'd have to pretty much spend all the earnings we'll make between now and the end of the holiday season just to afford the cost of moving since we have to consider we aren't just moving the normal amount of belongings of a couple, but also two studios worth of furniture and supplies from our businesses.

But this doesn't mean we won't return to the idea of moving to Austin when our businesses are more stable and we can afford for Taka to take 6-12 months to build up his client-base again. We both really felt at home in Austin and do believe it still has a high chance of being our home in the future, but for now we've decided to continue building the relationships and opportunities we've been working so hard on in Seattle these past two years. :)

For Shishido Creative, now that I've trial-and-errored a lot of local events and have an idea which ones are worth it for me to do, I am planning to focus on doing more out-of-state events in 2023 starting with Katsucon in February and hopefully many more if we can get accepted to AA or as exhibitors!

PRODUCTION UPDATES

No extra news since I just sent out an update on Monday, but the pins I showed pics of should be in this upcoming Monday. We also just got in our eco-bags and they are so dang cute/cool, we can't even handle it! We already have some ideas for more eco-bags both original and fandom based. I don't have to do much prep for my next events since I've gotten my event process down pretty well, so I'll be focused next week on vectoring the November designs as well as grading all the incoming pins (which will be a lot again). My goal is to get all new designs graded and shipped out before Black Friday! I'll also be planning to do Black Friday promos earlier than I've done in previous years as it's going to be an insanely busy month with me heading to LA twice for Anime Expo Chibi and DesignerCon! :o

Anyway, that's all for today, but more coming in the next few days as Taka wraps up November Pretty Winkers and floral! Thank you all and looking forward to more exciting updates/designs/art to share with you all shortly!

- Mandy & Taka