What I've Been Up To

Been a while since I had time to post on here. I've been quite busy.

First up, the shop is still open and doing well. Last night I went through all the numbers from October and had a bit of a surprise. In August and September I focused a lot of my efforts on the online component - bartertown and eBay. In October I pretty much ignored all my online sales - kind of as an experiment and partly out of laziness. The results were pretty shocking. In August and September I had twice as much revenue as I did in October. Due to the much narrower margins on online sales this did not result to twice as much income.

I actually turned a small profit in August and September, and had a small deficit in October. At first glance I was crushed. I was seeing the end of times. Then I thought about it a bit more and realized what had happened. For one I didn't have any online sales - even though it is a much smaller margin this still helps. I also bought a bunch of crap for myself in October - Ultraforge Daemons, Dark Eldar preview kits, and a few other bits and bobs. When you subtract this out from everything (or if I had actually managed to pay for these items like I should) I would have made right at the same amount of profit that I had in the previous two months.

So moving forward I am going to have to make a few changes. For one I am going to have to refocus on the online component. I am going to shift this portion of the business over to moving stale product instead of ordering in things to sell. The second change is going to be that I have to pay for the things I order - it really adds up when I don't.

On the hobby front I actually got quite a bit done in October. I have painted up the Dark Eldar preview models that I got from Games Workshop - I have a ten man Warrior squad, a Raider, and three Reaver Jet Bikes. I ordered some resin bases from Dragon Forge Design and will post some pics of the models when I get them based.

I also painted up an entry for the Wyrd Rotten Harvest contest. My entry is in the Witches and Warlocks category. I can't say which one it is yet, but when the contest is over I will be sure to post some pics of it - I had a really good time working on this model.

Malifaux is still the current reigning champ at the shop. Every weekend people are getting in games of it. This coming weekend we are having our first event in the area and I am expecting it to be a lot of fun. Right now it looks like we will have between 4 and 6 people show up - that is a bit on the small side but will be perfect for our first event. I have started work on my second game. I am building up a Hamelin the Plagued crew out of the Rising Powers book. So far there are now models for this crew so I am having to some conversion work. So far I have fourteen rats finished, and my Hamelin model has had the dog removed, the staff changed, and the rat taken off of the side of his head. When I get him painted up I will post some pictures.

Warhammer 40k and Fantasy have really fallen off the map locally. I think with the release of the Dark Eldar it is going to pick back up. A lot of local players were a bit burned out after the tournament season, couple that with the start of school for all the students and teachers and it makes for a slow time of year. As we start to move into the Holiday season people should start having more free time and the new Dark Eldar are going to play so different that I think 40k is really going to pick back up.

Fantasy has been slow but steady. It had a big jump when the new rules came out, but the honeymoon is over. Several local people are still slowly building up armies, but the progress has really slowed down on that front. Hopefully with the release of the next army book early next year we will see interest pick back up.