Weekly Store Update: 5 June

FANTASY FLIGHT FREEBIES

We keep an eye on the Asmodee Print & Play section. If you hadn't heard, Asmodee has a site dedicated to free Print & Play content. The items range from add-ons to current games, and even full games.

Just now there are several neat additions to the Living Card Games Arkham Horror and Lord of the Rings - and for the latest version of Descent too!

It's free to sign up, and you can check everything they have available here: Asmodee Print & Play

OUR JUNE VACATION PLANS

Wendy and I take two vacations away from the store every year...give or take. Generally, they are in June and October. This year is no exception, and we will be out from 15 to 22 June. 

Well, first a little story. That's a few days longer than we usually take, but we're driving this year. I don't know if you've seen airline prices lately, but the news isn't exaggerating with their stories of prices skyrocketing to 30% or higher than last year. After we saw the airline prices, we pivoted to a different approach. So, driving it is, and therefore we need more time. 

In any case, we'll have the Magic the Gathering sales paused on Deckbox and the store closed to foot traffic. We are, however, planning on keeping our web sales going strong. This is new for us. 

Normally we'd leave a banner on the page telling customers we were not at the helm and when we'd be back to process their orders. Then, upon our return, we'd line up all the web orders and get them knocked out. It has been working that way for years. 

Well, this year we're going to try something different. Over the last several months we've been training a few part timers, and they are doing really well. They have now fully embraced the "Stone Valley Way" when it comes to packaging and shipping timeliness. So, for the first time ever, we're going to try and keep that running while we're away. I'm excited about it, let me tell you, and so are they!

MAIL ORDER ANYONE?

We received an unusual request from a prison warden. He relayed that they were looking for a way for their work release prisoners to be able to obtain roleplaying books and other items. With no access to the internet, but with money from their jobs, purchasing through normal stores was virtually impossible. 

I mentioned that we could develop a mail order catalog with those specific items and get it sent to him to reproduce and distribute as he needed. He absolutely loved the idea.

Then, of course, I had to actually develop the thing. Considering I haven't even seen a mail order catalog in... what, like fifteen - maybe twenty years, it took a while to even conceive how it would look. Then longer to figure out how to make it work. It's not like there are a lot of software plugins to develop mail order catalogs anymore (there are none) ...so it was good ole' ingenuity. I used Excel and PDF Pro as the main tools and cobbled the photos and product information together from webstore exports. I tried to keep it as clean as possible so it could be more easily expanded and reproduced in the future. The longest part was including the photos. For anyone who works with Excel...you know what that's like. 

In any case, after a few hours I had a representative sample and a few hours after that a finished product. With Wendy's seal of approval, I sent if off.

I've shown a few pages of the catalog below: the cover page, one of the product pages, and the order form itself. Just click to be able to see them better and to switch between the pages. 

I'm not sure if this will lead to anything or not, but I had been thinking about a mail order catalog for a long time. The phone call was just the spark I needed to get it worked out. Mission accomplished!