Alternative Mechaton flag stickers

My Mechaton kits sold out Saturday morning! I wish I could have afforded to send more, but I was pushing it with over a $250 investment.

If you landed here because you bought one of my Mechaton kits at Gen Con and you don't care for the flag design you received… pick one and send me your mailing address (email link on the left there), and I'll drop a set of stickers in the mail for you. (I'll even customize the colors for you if you want.)

(That Chinese character is "dragon", btw.)

On the assembly of mechs

So I decided to do something a little crazy… I decided to build Mechaton kits for Vincent Baker to take to Gen Con.

See, I got this idea of building and selling kits for two reasons… one, Mechaton isn't so easy to build right-sized mechs for out of your standard Lego set. Not even out of a good-sized Technic set. Building tight little mech designs requires lots of specialized parts. I was unable to build even one basic "Stumpy" mech out of the book. (I had zero "Tile, Modified 1 x 1 with Clip", and Stumpy requires two for each arm.)

Reason two, trolling around Bricklink.com, learning how it all works, building a parts list, and finding a seller that has most of everything you want, then making on-the-fly substitutions… that's a lot of of work. I figured that all that work would turn people off of the game, and I had already done all that work, so I could leverage it into more people playing Mechaton and a little cash in my pocket for the trouble.

So I asked Vincent about my selling them, and he said he didn't have kits to take to Gen Con this year, and I offered to put together a few. That was less than three weeks before the start of the convention, and I knew it was tight… but I didn't know just how tight it'd be.

So I ordered parts for eight kits. I was shooting for about $15 a kit total cost, planning to sell for $30. I ended up right at $15 in parts, so I knew I'd run a little high, but I didn't think it'd be a big deal.

While I was waiting for those, and based on how well that went, finding all the parts I needed at one store, I ordered parts for another eight kits from a different store (since I'd wiped out stock on several parts in the previous store).

While placing this second order, I realized that I'd forgotten "flags". The basic Mechaton game is essentially Capture the Flag, and the flags are little 1x1 plates with clips that you attach to an antenna. Then I got the bright idea of using real Lego flags… they're 2x2 (a little over 1/2" square) with two clips, with room for a sticker. Turned out they were the most expensive part in the kit by nearly double. So while I was waiting for the parts to arrive, I was designing little "clan" stickers to put on the flags. My intent was to provide an assortment of stickers in each kit.

The first batch of parts arrived. Four of the hinge parts I needed were of the wrong type, so I scavenged those out of my personal kit. I discovered that I forgot to order "windshields" for the mechs… I needed 32 and I had only eight in my personal kit. Time for an emergency order… at this point, it was 7/31, and I had to have finished kits in Vincent's hands by 8/14. Two weeks. Sounds like plenty of time to get in an order and get it here.

So I hunted down a store with a minimum order of $3, actual shipping charges, and the parts I needed. (Might as well throw in a couple bits for me.) Note the "actual shipping"… at this point, I had a fixed retail price, so every extra dollar I spent was a dollar out of my pocket.

I got back to sticker making, and realized that to include a set of stickers in each of six designs for six flags per kit meant… 72 stickers per kit, or 1,152 stickers. Ouch… not only would that be labor-intensive, it was also about an entire pack of adhesive labels. An unexpected $10 out of my pocket. And since my stickers were 1/2" squares punched (with a scrapbooking punch) out of label material, they turned out to be really hard to separate from the backing. The solution was to separate strips of stickers from the backing, split the backing with scissors, and re-stick the strip, and then punch them out. Very nice split backing, easy to remove… but really time-consuming. This is the one place I compromised my original vision… no sticker assortment. Each kit got a pre-selected sticker set, pre-applied to the flags. (I'm going to provide alternative stickers to those who ask… it's printed on the instruction sheet.)

While playing with stickers and designing my cool instruction sheet (I'll post that in a follow-up post), big batch of parts #2 arrives. And many of the used parts are plain dirty. The flags all had sticker residue… took me half-an-hour with a bottle of Goo Gone to clean them. Then I spent two evenings in front of the TV with a bucket of soapy water and 800 1x4 bricks (for building walls), cleaning them with an electric toothbrush. Well, maybe I should say 760 or so bricks, since I was shorted nearly 10 of each of the four colors. (And the store owner still has not shipped my replacements.) I can make do there… borrow a few bricks from my son, and each kit gets 48 instead of 50 terrain bricks.

In between all this, I was hunting for packaging. That turned out to be a lot more expensive than I expected. Decent packaging is only cheap when you buy it in huge quantities, and it was getting difficult to find a good package for under a buck. Another $16 in expenses. I finally settled on a nice white cardboard box that was under fifty cents (and landed me with 34 extra boxes to organize my junk with).

So it all came together, pretty little boxes with pretty little labels, pretty little instruction sheets, pretty little mech kits… except half the kits were missing windshields.

It turned out that low minimum order meant slow customer service… he took three days to get the order in the mail. Doesn't sound like much, but keep in mind that I need to ship far enough in advance to be comfortable not paying for two-day air shipping. That meant shipping by 8/8 at the latest. With delivery over the weekend, I was looking at a Monday delivery… cutting it close. And they didn't show up on Monday… they arrived on Tuesday, loose parts and a shredded envelope in a big plastic bag with a "We're sorry for mangling your package" note from the Post Office. And only 27 of the 40 windshield bricks, and three of those damaged. Fortunately, I had exactly enough in my personal kit to complete all eight kits. I'm glad I'd ordered a few extras.

So finally, it all came together. The box went into FedEx's ground delivery stream a day earlier than my "worry too much" deadline, and, according to FedEx, were delivered on the Saturday before the Tuesday delivery deadline. I say according to FedEx, because I haven't actually heard from Vincent… I'm assuming that, with Gen Con preparations on his end, no news is good news, and he'd have emailed me if it didn't show.

Overall, I'm happy with how things came out. The parts were a little over budget, the stickers were a little more expensive than I planned, the packaging was close to what I'd hoped for… even my wild guess at shipping costs was only a couple bucks low. But by the time I was done, my cost per-kit was $16.45, when I'd originally budgeted for $15. Not all that bad, considering the 6 flags in each kit bumped the cost by $1.08 after I'd thought I had everything I needed, and I could have just bought the "traditional" 1x1 clips for a lot less.

Still, if we sell them all, that's over $200 profit, and I had fun doing it.

If I were to do it again, I'd start much earlier, and avoid used parts for the common bricks (which seemed to be the damaged ones). And I'd find a better way to manage the flag stickers, but I think I'd stick with the 2x2 flags… they're just cool. I'd like a nicer package, but that would require doing more than 16 kits, or enough lead time to really search around and find a good deal on packaging.

I'll let you know how sales went when Gen Con ends. :)