Tuesday, January 1, 2019

Turning Lessons into Action in 2019

Did you miss me?  Things got busy.  I definitely did not have the luxury of writing for the past couple of weeks.

I intimated last time out that I had clarity on some things.  There are going to be some DSG adjustments and the first one is in process now.  The market has spoken, and when it buys tabletop products from me, it mostly does so from my fulfillment channels on Amazon and eBay.  In store, not so much.

In-store, Magic is the absolute king.  It is the #1 category in store by sales and its subcategories make up six of the top ten subs.  Three others in that top ten are video games, which together are the #2 category.  The other category to place one sub in the top ten is Dungeons & Dragons.  Board games and miniatures both missed.  In 2018 they missed badly.

In smaller communities, hybrid stores with good processes can be in a lucrative business position.  Increasingly I am concluding from observations that in major metro areas, a store has to commit hard to a narrower range of things.  I can carry anything in my store that I can source, but if I want to make any kind of real money on it, I need to dominate that category.  I need to at least be attempting to be the top source in town.  If we are that, we get a huge audience; people drive past competitors to come to us first.  If we miss, we're still the top choice for miles in any direction, and overwhelm any new competitors.  So we'll never stop pushing Magic to get bigger and better, and while we're at it, a lot of resources right now are going to go into building the video game category into a crushing force.
Where will I get those resources?  Largely from online liquidation of most of my existing stock of board games and Warhammer.  My romantic notion of being all things for all people has me clinging to those categories as a "one day," so rather than just dropping them, I am going to put both into "offseason mode" like I did for board games for the first three quarters in 2018.  Since my end-of-year blowouts still failed to move the bulk of my stock in those categories -- and we're talking about below-MAP pricing across the board, and most board games in the 50% discount range -- I have a pile of giant distributor boxes full of titles that will be headed to Amazon fulfillment this week.

Isn't the offseason-mode plan costing me sales, you might reasonably ask?  I'm sure there are some, and I'm not sure it's a lot.  It's impossible to know which sales a store is really missing, but we know month in and month out that most requests are for "common" titles, and fewer requests come in except in December for deeper catalog titles, relatively speaking.  Moreover, whatever tabletop games do come out during the offseason tend to end up on the clearance rack before long.  Was there any new evergreen in 2018 other than Discover Lands Unknown?  Will that game actually be an evergreen like it appears so far?  Nobody knows!  What I do know is we sold plenty of Catan and Dice Forge and Concept and Dixit and Agricola and Azul and Exit and silly party games.  And you don't have to be wall-to-wall board games like Glendale's magnificent Imperial Outpost or even my northern neighbors in Tempe, the Game Depot, to make those sales.  Those sales are low-hanging fruit and they suit my diet just fine.  I'll let stores like those two cover the deep end of the pool for tabletop, as they've been doing.

Out with the old, in with the nucleus, as cartoon science professors are wont to say.  I will be adding two new categories to the store that I'm already overlapping into, and I have some outstanding sourcing and infrastructure for them, so I expect to run strong very quickly with them, in keeping with the concepts discussed above.  One of these new categories will appear later in January.  The other will appear around April or May, depending on how some parts of the project play out.

A consequence of these adjustments is that the game room configuration needs to change, because a bunch of the rest of the store needs to reconfigure for functional purposes.  The TCG capacity will grow back to its prerelease levels after I finish with a temporary closure of about a quarter of the game room.  Minis are going to be down at least one table.  I know this will worry some of my minis players, but the reality is those tables are rarely used anymore.  D&D was already down a table because so many of the groups disrupt the room arrangement and don't put it back, and we had it set exactly to how it needed to be to gain that last table... and I don't have time in the day to be manually resetting it every time they decide to be inconsiderate, so we'll be down one table in order that I can sleep without worrying about fire code compliance.

Anyway now I've devolved from concept content into my honey-do list as usual, so I'll leave it at that and wish you all a great start to your 2019, the Year of the New Ori Game!

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