Week of March 29th, 2021

Well, I had a good run!
(I did not have a good run.)

For the most part, we focused on the arrival of new products, sending them to clients for final review, fulfilling orders, and coming up with new designs. 

While watching people on videos wear pins as an actual clothing accessory, and not just something to collect, I saw a lot of subtle/stylish pins being worn. And seeing something done for Star Wars pins by another company, something new clicked with me, and we finally began the process of designing pins of three characters for five different properties, to test the waters.

The response to what I have teased on social media, has been really good. Also doing the thing where you finish an illustration/design, and then walking away from it for a few days, to go back to it with a set of eyes, helped confirm that even I liked it, and wanted to continue designing them.

Manufacturing has been a little slow after the Lunar New Year, but it's looking like they're starting to catch up to the queue of orders we placed in from January through now. But, while a good problem to have, it's still a problem, we're starting to run out of inventory and can't keep up with the demand. When you sell on Amazon, that isn't the best thing, because the algorithm will start ranking your product down, which hurts the search results. You want your stuff on their marketplace as long as possible, basically until the product is no longer in demand.

Otherwise,I spent time last week taking care of home and family things, while the rest of the team took care of their assignments.

But Sunday, that made me happy when there was a special event for Jojo's Bizarre Adventure in Japan, and basically they revealed Stone Ocean is in development. We're unable to work on that season until Viz Media gives us the okay, but that shouldn't be too much of a problem!

-Josh