The Great Re-Muggening

Essential information: today is the Preview Day where you look at the mugs and plan your purchase. We uploaded mostly what people asked to be replaced and some new stuff.

If the mug you want is not available or is in the wrong size, please comment below and we will add it. So if you want a latte mug with Here Kitty, Kitty or a 20 oz mug with the BDH designs, let us know.

All orders will automatically go into production in 1 hour. Be sure you have the correct address and the correct email.

If you made a mistake, we can sometimes get in there and edit things before the item ships, but it’s not a guarantee.

Some mugs will arrive broken. We are using a vendor who ships them in cardboard because we don’t want to make more plastic garbage than we have to. If the mug arrives broken, snap a picture and email us through the store. The vendor will replace it at no charge to us.

The store opens on Saturday.

For those of you who would like to understand more about merch, the pricing, etc, please prep with a caffeinated beverage of your choice for this merchandise saga post. This will be long.

Background

The last time we opened the store, one of the vendors quit midway through. Unfortunately, the orders were already in, so we had to spend three days going through each order manually, and refunding the cost of that item and the portion of taxes and shipping that applied to that item only. The amount of stress and work this generated broke me for a bit.

The plan was to abandon the merch ship. I deleted all the merch items, and we reopened as an ebook only. Best laid plans, ha!

A while ago, people in the Facebook fan group lamented that their mugs broke, and there was no way to replace them. Coincidentally, at that point B.A. Bookish approached us and asked if we could license them to produce merchandise.

License in this case means that we gave them permission to use some of our images and quotes to get them started. The idea was that they would produce merch, pay us the industry standard 15% of the profit, and everything would be fine.

This has proven to be a bit of a disaster through no fault of B.A. Bookish. For some reason, some people thought that their store was our store. The fact that they are not us is just not landing. This makes me extremely reluctant to enter a partnership with anyone else, because some portion of the BDH refuses to acknowledge that we do not have full control over what that vendor may design.

This is probably due to the fact that most of the people don’t know how much merch costs and how licensing works, which is why I will break it down below.

Also, B.A. mugs are metal and cannot be microwaved, so we haven’t solved the broken mug issue.

With that in mind, we are reopening the store with mugs. Today is the Preview day, meaning, you can look at the store, comment here to make requests for the mugs of a certain design and size, and plan your purchase so you don’t have the morning-after regrets.

Tomorrow the store will officially open. It will remain open semi-permanently. It may be periodically paused for a couple of days, if we need to make adjustments or wait for the money to catch up, because we don’t get the payments immediately. PayPal often sits on it for like 45 days or something. But the plan is to keep it mostly open, so please don’t panic buy. Please.

How it works

My philosophy for the merchandise is that it is fan service. We are not mug sellers or T-shirt sellers. We don’t even want to sell books, to be honest. We would rather just write and let someone else handle the selling part.

Nobody is owed merchandise. Fan service, by definition, is an extra. However, merch is nice to have, and it makes us happy. This is my happy merch:

The girl on the left is Umaru-chan. She comes from an anime about a girl who is perfect and poised in school and turns into that funny version at home, where she wants to play video games all day, eat steak and chips, and drink Coke. I love this because Kid 1 gave her to me. We watched the anime together, and looking at Umaru-chan makes me happy. Also, Kid 1 is totally Umaru-chan.

To me, merch should meet several requirements:

• Be of decent quality. These are not heirlooms, but they should look nice.
• Be somewhat affordable. Nobody wants to pay $30 for an 11 oz mug on top of shipping.
• Must not take up a ton of our time
• Must not land us into a financial hole.

We cannot maintain inventory. We cannot spend time shipping a lot of small orders. All of this costs too much money and time. This is why we are going with drop shipping, which is basically Print On Demand. We provide artwork and the vendor makes the item and ships it. Because of that, they charge more for shipping and production.

We have 3 sizes of mugs available: 11 oz, 15 oz, and 20 oz. In addition, some mugs are white, some are black, and some have a color interior. We also have latte mugs, which are at 12 oz. All mugs shipped to the US will have free shipping.

Funny story about this: one of the readers measured the volume of the latte mugs and informed me that it was not quite 12 oz. I asked if she wanted a refund. I don’t remember how we resolved the slightly less than 12 oz issue, but no merch can stand up to that level of scrutiny. If you are expecting a high end item, this is not it. These are mass-market produced standard mugs. They are microwavable and dishwasher safe.

The price of the mugs is calculated as follows: cost of the mug (what the vendor charged us to make it) + shipping + $5. We need to make at least $5 off a mug to make up our costs. We pay annually for the store website and the bookkeeper to file taxes stateside, and we pay EU people to file our VAT and taxes. And we must recoup design costs.

Most of the mugs follow this pricing table:

• 11 oz – $15.99
• 12 oz latte – $19.99
• 15 oz – $19.99
• 20 oz – $25.99

Some of the mugs are more expensive. The black mugs cost more to make, for example. But I want to highlight the artist mugs.

This is one of those mugs. It is a 15 oz that retails for $21.99.

We’ve worked with a lot of artists over the years and we have access to beautiful art. However, licensing art for merchandising means extra fees. Some artists do not want to do it, because they prefer to retain control or they simply don’t want their artwork on a tote bag.

Some artists ask for a very high fee. I’ve been quoted $2,000 per image before. A quick calculation: how many mugs do we have to sell to make up $2,000?

When you buy a mug, we don’t get money immediately. We pay the vendor immediately, however. So for every $5 earned, we must first put $15.

To make up $2,000, we must sell 400 mugs and invest additional $6,000 into production on top of the $2,000 we paid. And we haven’t broken even at this point. We still have all the costs I mentioned above and we haven’t paid ourselves for labor. This is for just one design.

In an effort to not land ourselves into a financial hole but still provide you with pretty mugs, we are doing a split. The artist mugs are priced higher – we are making $7 instead of $5 – and we are splitting that $7 50/50 with the artist. So when you buy a mug with Helena‘s art or Candice‘s art, they get $3.50 or however the split happens to land.

In the past, we would approve orders manually. We cannot do that now. It takes too long. To reiterate:

All orders will automatically go into production in 1 hour. Be sure you have the correct address and the correct email.

If you made a mistake, we can sometimes get in there and edit things before the item ships, but it’s not a guarantee.

Some mugs will arrive broken. We are using a vendor who ships them in cardboard because we don’t want to make more plastic garbage than we have to. If the mug arrives broken, snap a picture and email us through the store. The vendor will replace it at no charge to us.

UK, AUS, EU

We are planning to make all mugs available to the territories above. We are waiting for the service that collects VAT to sort us out, because physical products are different from ebooks. (We paid VAT before, but I deleted everything when I removed the merch.) So the international store will open a little later. But we have mug vendors lined up.

Canada

Working on it.

Phew. Okay, I’m going to go kill Maggie now, and you have fun looking at the store and making evil plans.