Second to Last Post for the Second to Last Friday of the Year
Happy Christmas Eve, y’all!
Unless you don’t celebrate it, in which case, happy second to last Friday of 2021! 😂 In any case, we just wanted to pop in as this will be one of our last posts of the year.
To be honest, we haven’t been feeling very festive as money’s been tight as we have a bunch of designs in production but no actual new products to sell, so definitely in financial limbo. My present to Taka this year was his flight back to Japan which we booked before Omicron was in announced, but we decided that it was just too risky for him to go back with the high likeliness that Japan will announce an even longer quarantine when he arrives which could easily eat up more than half his trip. I wasn’t able to get his flight refunded since I bought part of it with my air miles, so all I could get was a credit towards a future flight. I did still manage to get him a couple gifts, but nothing very extravagant. Of course he also cancelled his Airbnb but still could only get 50% back so that’s almost $500 he lost, too. 🥲 but we’d rather be safe than sorry for him wasting his time and money. A big reason he wanted to go home was because there is a tebori artist (who currently lives in the Netherlands) that was going to be in Japan for most of December and early January. Taka had hoped to be able to work on some of his clients and pay for three sessions with the tebori artist, but if the quarantine were to be extended, he’d miss the opportunity altogether.
Shop Drops
On a happier note, we are planning to do a drop on Dec. 26th 9am PST for y’all to get your hands on extras of Usagi, Ikuko Mama, Nehelenia, and either of the miscolored Lunas. As always, you’ll have first access and you’ll get exclusive access to the Collector grades, which I believe we only have about 15 or so of Usagi in her blue background color.
We will also be releasing a restock of Princess Lady in both her original color and pastel color. This is the first restock we’ve had of her since we first produced her in late 2019. We ran out of Collector grades of her pretty fast but couldn’t restock til we had dwindled our “B-grades” of her down. We had hoped Helios would be coming in with her, but alas, still waiting on updates about him. As far as we know there have been no issues with him, just taking long for some reason.
After y’all have first grab at the pins, we will do our public drop on Dec 31st! We are also going to be releasing a very small amount of Fukubukuro (Lucky Boxes) that will have 4-5 pins in them! There will be 8 boxes total in fact as that is considered a lucky number in Japan because turned sideways it can be infinity, as well as the kanji 八 looks like something is opening, which means you’re open to good luck coming into your life.
We will also put GachAnimal Plays back on the site for some New Year’s fun!
Also, these are already in production, but we have these preorders available for those of you who wanna guarantee first dibs! I'll also make an AkeOme listing like we did last year for you to get a bundle of lucky items pins!
We're also down to only one lucky hammer pin left, so we already have a restock in production, including a new "Lucky in Love" pink variant that will be available for preorder on 12/26 as well.
Pin Club Campaign
Finally, as many of you know, we have been pushing to strengthen our brand, particularly our original characters and designs. One of our goals is to grow the membership of our original designs pin club, and we’d love your help in doing it! Our original club has about 50 members and we’d love to get it up to 100 members! If we can do that, we will do random picker online for one lucky member to receive an entire year of pin club membership for free! To help us reach that goal, we’d love for you to share our posts when we announce the new club theme, tag us in pics of your pin mail, or invite friends who might be interested in joining! ♥️ More details on this soon!
12 Month Rewards
Finally, as 2021 comes to a close, so many of you have 12 month gifts to look forward too. They are still in production, but I promise you will love the surprise when they get in hand. We’ll let you know when they start shipping out so you know when to expect them. If you have any questions on whether you will receive it or not, please feel free to EMAIL us at shishidocreative@gmail.com and we can let you know what your status is, esp since some of you joined a little later in the year. Please do keep in mind, we will try to send out the best quality pins, but these are a free gift so we aren’t guaranteeing collector grade like we do for the paid pins. And when we run out, we will never restock for future members. If you joined later and reach the 12 month mark after we run out of the freebie pins, you’ll be qualified for the second year freebie pin we will produce.
Goodbye, Patreon
This doesn't really affect you if you're on this page reading this, but going to add this to the post here as well. At last, the time has come for us to close memberships for our Patreon. If we have any other updates before the end of the year, we will post them there, too. But after that, we will be done using Patreon. We will keep our account just in case we need it for the future, but there won’t be any updates and we will be manually removing any remaining members on Dec 30th to avoid anyone getting charged as of January 1st. All members who have already joined here on the site should receive a freebie sticker as we announced back in October as a thank you for your extra effort! If you’ve already been charged for December on Patreon, and for some reason we haven't refunded you for joining here, please feel free to give us a nudge. ☺️
As always, we want to thank you for all the support you’ve shown us, whether this is your first month or 30th month! :o We hope we can continue to make gorgeous designs you will love for years to come and we appreciate all the kindness you’ve shown us!
Happy Holidays!
- Mandy + Taka