So we're doing #momocon next weekend in Atlanta.
Well, no.
We're doing #Wonderfest which is a Japanese handmade toy show. The first Wonder Festival in the US is inside Momocon.
This is a thread, I have things to say.
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Momocon is reporting that they expect 180,000 attendees over 4 days, with the bulk of those people coming on Saturday.
180,000 attendees is more people than I can conceive of.
Momocon has been very well advertised locally.
Well, no.
"locally" in this case meaning in metro Atlanta, not this far north.
But all through the metro there are momocon billboards and they're doing radio and print advertising.
It will be well attended.
But Wonderfestival has not been well advertised separately from momocon, and I'm convinced that folks who are attending momocon don't know it's happening.
This is going to create a weird dynamic, where people who are entirely unfamiliar with the art toy world are going to be discovering it for the first time.
Over and over again, tens of thousands of people, all day.
I don't think this will change things for us much, because the toys we make are made using similar techniques and materials to commercially produced toys. The toys we make are as sturdy and as tough as commercially produced toys. And they're priced in line with commercially produced toys.
(Well... Not *all* of them. Some of our toys are 3D printed, and some of what we're selling will be slightly more than commercially produced toys, but that's a non-issue.)
But for the folks who are making things in resin or 3D printed stuff, they're going to need to explain how handmade toys work, over and over again, and set expectations over and over again.
And the folks who are bringing higher-end art toys, sofubi and the like... well, they're going to be explaining and justifying their price points to an unfamiliar audience all weekend.
Hopefully, this is the only year that this is a problem, and future years will see more people who are already familiar with the score.
But yeah, our rubber Keshis are absolutely as strong as any similar commercially released toy from the last 60 years (and significantly tougher than many of them!)
And our jointed action figures can stand up to a large amount of wear and tear.
You can bend the legs on our jointed figures fully in half, and they'll just snap back.
Maybe they're not as tough as a commercially produced toy, but they're significantly more hard wearing than a 3D print or a resin cast toy.
We had a bunch of production problems in the lead up to this show that we were unprepared for.
Mold making in the leadup to this show was super flaky and error prone. Our printers fought with us, the lasers fought with us. Our suppliers ran out of plastic, One of our plastic suppliers sent us an entirely different product from what they had been sending us previously, and what they had been sending us previously is no longer available anywhere that I can find.
It's been rough.
But a lot of things have gone really well too, and we're back on track now.
Here's a picture of a bunch of toys we have designed, but will not be able to produce for this show.
These are proofs/prototypes from our 3D printer.
It looks like we've solved a lot of the production problems we were facing.
We've found a good alternative for the plastic we can't get, we found a new supplier for the stuff we use to color plastics, we've found a new potential partner for mold-making (and we've got a set of metal molds on order as a trial), and we're interviewing a new person to help with toy production.
Shortly, we should be Zooming.
