The Future of the Pin Club

Hi everyone!

I’ve returned from a successful trip to Boston! The event I tabled at, Anime Boston, went better than I could have imagined and you better bet your butts we’ll be trying to get in again next year as well. With the success of the Boston show, I’m really excited to be able to put some new surprise designs into production as well as some more restocks, pay off our taxes (we owed quite a bit for last year), and pay off all the table fees for events I had put on credit cards.  I know everyone is struggling during the constant inflation the world seems to be facing, so believe me when I say your support means so much to us in always helping our business to maintain and grow. 

It seems all the artists I spoke with did amazing as well, so there was just so much positive energy between attendees and artists alike. While I know not all events will be as wild as Anime Boston was (*cough* the event we just did on Saturday *cough*), we are looking forward to a bunch of other events this summer, although most of them are pretty local:

June 17-19: Geek Craft Expo in Portland, OR

July 8-9: Redmond Derby Days in Redmond, WA

July 16: Georgetown Makers Market in Seattle

August 4-5: Wholesale Market (Seattle)

August 7: UCU Maker’s Market (Seattle)

August 12-15: Anime Houston

I’ve applied for a couple others as well, but those are the ones set in stone. In July, Taka will be heading back to Japan to work on some clients as well as get his head tattooed!  He’s very excited to resume his travel plans that he had to cancel back in January.

PRETTY WINKERS FOREVER

With permission from one of your fellow pin collectors, Stephanie, I’m sharing the beginning of Neo Queen Serenity tattoo done by Taka. While we gave Stephanie permission to get it tattooed by any artist she wanted, she was insistent it be done by the original artist, none other than Taka himself!  They will be adding color in the next session they book. A few of you have also reached out to Taka to possibly get work done, which is just so fun and exciting! If you ever want to reach out to Taka about getting work done please feel free to follow him on IG @ryuki_irezumi or email him at ryuki.irezumi@gmail.com. You can also check out his portfolio at ryuki-irezumi.com

June Designs

Oh, silly me! I also realized I forgot to reveal the final designs for these. I'd had them done a couple days already but needed time to write this post and get things settled here back at home on the West coast. So here are the finished designs for June! :)

For Mugen club, we have 4 variants for the hydrangea (ajisai) including a special rainbow variant in honor of Pride month!

And because June is my birthday month, I was very self-indulgent, choosing to pin Koan (my favorite baddie on the show) and Pluto, my favorite character besides Mars. We hope you love all three of the designs for this very wonderful, exceptional month of my birth! :p

Production Updates

Exciting news for y’all! I’ve got word from the manu that the package they’re sending our way will include Esmeraude, Uranus, Petz, Neptune, Botan (peony), and I believe Calaveras will be coming too, though they didn’t send me a confirmation photo for her. But it was a very expensive shipping cost, so it will be very heavy and probably 2-3 boxes of pins coming in. Assuming Calaveras comes in, that means except for May designs, we’d be all caught up on pins! Woohoo!

Also, as I mentioned last month, I’ve given up on making my own stickers from home, so the 3 mo gift stickers just arrived and will be in the next boxes. I also have the sticker sheets for March, April, May and June for Mugen Club in production.

Inflation Costs

So something I haven't wanted to do and have been putting off for months and months is that I do think I am going to be needing to do a price increase to the club. I know this is not something anyone wants to hear as everything in the world keeps costing more and more. Believe me, I don't enjoy the lack of coupons on food due to food cost being driven up, the gas in our cars costing $40-80 every single time we need to fill up or top off, nor the insane cost I'm paying just to ship pins from the manu to myself. That said, I absolutely plan on improving your experience with the club and want your help choosing.

I would be charging $2 more for membership per month starting in July. This mainly covers the increased cost of shipping from our manu to us. Pin packages used to cost us about $200-400 before the pandemic, now it costs closer to $800+ which we've been paying all throughout the past two years without increasing anyone's membership prices. Furthermore, we are now going to be doing all sticker printing not in-house which means costs will be higher for maintaining the low club costs for the Mugen club. Ways we are considering to keep making the club accessible for you all are the following ideas:

• Combined shipping. This means if you'd like to buy extra products from the shop, you can add to your subscription boxes without paying extra shipping (within reason, this wouldn't work for things like t-shirts, or super giant orders that require priority shipping). But it's really a nice feature for some of you who want to add 1-4 pins in a month, especially if you're someone who enjoys shopping our drops. I did this in the first year of the pin club in 2020, but with so many more of you joining I wasn't able to manage combined packages. That said, I feel like maybe this would be worth it to many of you.
• Lower pin grade tier options. For those of you who aren't dead-set on getting a collector grade pin, I can send standards (still better than B-grade!) to you for the current price point. I don't know how many of you would want to join for this option since I know a lot of you do prefer to have collector grade, but I'll leave it up to the google form survey to give me an idea! For those who want Collector grade, the price would increase $2.
• More exclusive designs. Exactly as it sounds. We'd release more designs that are exclusive only to the secret shop.
• Digital Content. Things like wallpapers for your phone, printable files for those of you who like stickers/bujo and wanna make it at home, etc.
• An IG dedicated for Pin Club Members. A great way to get updates in a more visual form instead of just newsletter/blog posts.

Please be aware we may not be able to do all these things, and so if you could anonymously fill out the survey to help us decide how to move forward in a way that most benefits you all, we would really love to get your thoughts. We will absolutely be posting again on this topic before July so you could decide to stay or go from the club.

As always, we truly appreciate your support, patience, and understanding. It's hard work running a small business, creating content rather consistently, and being fulfillment, etc. So I always appreciate your support and completely respect the trust you put into us. More fun stuff on the way this month!

Mandy & Taka