September Pins

Hi everyone!

Hope you all had a relaxing Labor Day weekend! Mine was not all that relaxing as we tabled at Punk Rock Flea Market all weekend, which honestly knocked me out for most of Monday. I’ve been pushing myself a little too hard recently if I’m being honest. I’ve been tabling as much as possible which is good for helping us pay off bills and back taxes from 2021 😰, but it’s been really exhausting between that, vectoring, designing backing cards, trading cards and sticker sheets, grading and packing, and also hustling to get wholesale deals. Needless to say, I do have the vectors all wrapped up for September and omg they are so gorgeous if I do say so myself.

As I mentioned last week, Silver Era Savior is going to be exclusive to pin club which means no extras will be going into the public shop. I’m also excited to announce she will be the first gradient pin amongst the Pretty Winkers. She will also be about 2.25” due to her wings and the moon stick. Resentful Regent is also looking great and with lots of screen print. She will pair wonderfully against Silver Era Savior, or even with Masked Supporter from last month.

For the spider lily design, they are only going to be available in red by default, with one limited blue variant for all you KnY fans! 👺

On another note, I wanted to talk about some future plans for the pin club in 2023. I know it’s still a ways away, but I already expect a lot of you will drop off as our lineup of Pretty Winkers moves more towards baddies and side characters in the next year. Because of that, our goal is to add another pin club tier featuring Ghibli characters! 🎉 As you all know, we’ve wanted to do more than just SM characters, but have rarely strayed from it due to time constraints. Of course this is still going to be an issue, but Taka and I have been working hard on business plans and he’s ambitious enough to think he can actually pre-sketch a ton so he’s not doing everything last minute as usual. 😅 I sure hope so ‘cause y’all know how much the last minute vectoring kills me! 🙈 I can attest he’s been sketching a LOT lately, so I have faith in this goal.

And regarding our being busy, I do want to also reassure all of you that we are taking steps to improve our work schedule. Starting this month we are taking Mondays & Tuesdays off. Not to say we won’t ever be around to answer emails or if I need to get caught up on stuff, but we want to prioritize our time together. One of the struggles we didn’t really realize we’ve been having is that we have become more like business partners than a couple and that’s something we want to address personally. We used to have so much fun together, and while some of the lack of fun together was due to Covid and being broke when we first came to the US, a lot of it is just us being so focused on growing our business that we forgot to grow together too. We both admit part of that is also because we don’t enjoy doing stuff in the US as much as we did when we were in Japan or traveling. Our favorite things to do overseas were go to museums, arcades, karaoke, or explore, esp on motorcycle. And yes, it’s true we could go to museums and arcades here, but they’re sort of disappointing here in the Northwest. And as for exploring, things are a lot further than in the island countries, so most things can’t be done in a day trip. 😰

PRODUCTION UPDATES

I’ve gotten word from our manus that Pluto is about to be shipped out along with Rubeus, a small restock of Golden Queen of Shadows, a restock of our Hands of the Sorcerer, as well as some small surprise designs! :p I look forward to getting those all in probably next week, though I don’t look forward to grading them all. 🙈

Stay tuned for some sketches and other updates soon! Planning to vector out at least one of the planetary princesses soon! I’ll keep you updated shortly! Thank you as always!

- Mandy & Taka