So Much Prettiness has arrived + Surprise Reveal!

Rejoice! So many pins came in last night and they are all looking amazing. I took a little extra effort in taking nice pics of them for you all. Keep in mind we grabbed the pins randomly from bags and bags of pins, and the fact that the random ones we grabbed were near flawless is a good sign that this large batch that came in is primo!

First up, we are absolutely thrilled to finally reveal a design we've kept under wraps for around 4-5 months! But at last, we can share the long-requested SLR Cosmos!

Size: 2.5"
Features: Glitter in background colors, a swirl pearl in the white areas of the background, 5 screenprints, cutouts, and a pin-club exclusive backstamp

She is exclusive to the secret shop, but I will begin sharing pics of her on our IG so that anyone who wants to try and get her has time to join the club before she drops. We don't plan to restock her anytime soon (if at all), but I think we ordered enough of her that even if every single current pin club member wanted her, you'd be able to get her! :)

I'll be grading her this week and will aim to have her drop in the secret shop on Wednesday, January 19th at 2pm PST. She will be sold for around $30-35 (depending on pin grade). I know this is nearly double what we usually charge for Pretty Winkers, but she actually cost us 4x more than what it usually costs to make her—would you believe she actually cost us more than our larger Moon Gaze pin?! Oh how I long for the earlier days of pin making, now the cost of manufacturing just keeps increasing by the day. In an effort to save you all a little money, I'll be refunding the shipping on any orders placed between 1/19-1/23 and add them to your pin club boxes, so this is a great time to stock up if you've been eyeing some other items in the shop. The refunded shipping will only be for members who are already waiting on boxes with H3lios, M!str3ss 9, or October or November designs. New members who only signed up in December or January, or who are not in pin tiers will still have to pay shipping as this isn't combined with an outstanding subscription box.

Speaking of pin club boxes, while I do have the backing cards for Helios and M!str3ss 9 in-hand already since I ordered those back in the summertime, I am still waiting on the most recent batch of backing cards to come in and will be shipping out all the pin club boxes probably during the week of 1/24. That gives us plenty of time to unbag all the thousands of pins, grade, make boxes (with our NEW BRANDING!!!!), and double check everyone's outstanding pins we owe so we can make sure we get everything right!

Anyway, here are the other pins we got in (and there are a lot!) last night. I'll put them in consecutive order of the months :

First off, we finally have the beautiful M!str3ss 9—and look! She has a nose and mouth!  haha She looks really beautiful, and we just love the softer pastel variant as well, though Taka did say she looks significantly less evil in pastel, which I do agree!

At long last, H3lios has arrived! I was so nervous because our manu hadn't sent us any pics of him finished and last week when I asked when we'd be getting any updated pics they were like "Oh, he's in the box I just sent." Of course I was super uncertain about that because I had no idea how he'd turn out, but OMG, he's perfect! Honestly, I think even more handsome than the vector art we showed! And he pairs so beautifully with Princess Lady (which I'll take pics of them together later).

Next up is October's Dancing Tanuki which looks very cool! And of course the bubbly SLR V3nus!

And two of our Amazonian sisters from October & November.

November's Kamaitachi turned out really cool, especially the manga variant! And our beautiful Girl Genius!

We also have some restocks of some of our popular original designs, many including newer variants:

And for our lucky new year designs! The Uchideno Kozuchi is a restock, with a new variant, but the Inu Hariko and Maneki Neko are new and have been quite popular as a preorder. I imagine I'll be needing to restock within a couple months or less!

What's Next?

As of now, I don't have any new pictures for December or January designs but our manu has implied that we may get December (possibly even January) designs in before the long Lunar New Year holiday, so that would be great! In the meantime, we spent most of last week prepping marketing materials for a B2B wholesale event we will attend next weekend. I don't imagine it will be packed since attendance is already reported that only about 65% of the normal amount of merchants will be attending, so I'm a little iffy about how we'll do, but we are still going to move forward in taking this step towards expanding our brand and trying to get our brand and original designs into small boutiques around the country. One of our small steps toward world domination! haha jk... kinda.

I won't lie that Taka and I dream of being able to build our original brand and characters big enough that they become popular like Sanrio, Pusheen, or even smaller but still popular character goods. Taka has been working on more original characters and they're just so dang cute that we're slowly building a world/story for them. Last year, we re-designed our shishi pups with a softer, sweeter look, and introduced Kyuu-chan to yokai club members. We look forward to introducing a couple more characters soon too!

Anyway, we hope you're all as excited about the new designs and thank you for your patience while we wait for the backing cards to come in so we can pack up your orders! Let us know if you have any questions or concerns in the comments or via email at shishidocreative@gmail.com

- Mandy + Taka