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The Making of THE Olivia plush (and our other merch)
Many artsy types complain about not having money. The whole “starving artist” meme is very real, but largely optional. This article will focus on this topic through the lease of our journey of merchandising with Wani. We’ve been very successful with this overall and think that it would be of great public service to artists trying to make money to explain our successful tactics.
This article was originally going to be paid only, but we opted to make it free and put a sponsorship for our Olivia Plush in to make money instead. If you haven’t already bought one, we encourage you to do so to show us that self-sponsored posts work so that we may do more in the future.
Mentality Shift
For your main artsy project, you want to follow the advice in our “How to snoot it up” series. That should give you decent enough advice on how to make something that is worth people’s time. This segment will focus on how to turn the attention you have into profit. For this, you will need a major mentality shift.
This mentality shift is one from “creative artist” to “niche filler”. Instead of having an over-arching grand point of feels and emotions, you’re going for something smaller, less impactful, but stands on its own. There is a right way and wrong way to do this, just like with any art, and the formula for measuring quality, that being:
The quality of the artwork can be measured by how much of the artist’s intent can translate to its targeted audience.
For merchandise, your goal won’t be something grand and important, like a message about the world, but instead displaying a homage to your own work so when people see what you’re selling they say “Wow! I know that thing!”.
Yes, this means that you’re going to largely be going for superficial aspects of your work, which may irk some artists. I would like to remind those artists that not making money is tantamount to not making better art. A starving artist can’t work, expand his craft, and generally is less able to be independent. There is nothing dignified about suffering in vain. It only tortures you with a lack of budget, a situation that will hamper your message’s spread, deprive your customers of good product, and hurt your family. While you may not make things you necessarily “like”, if you have talent you have a good chance making things people like if you put effort into it and have the right direction for your merchandise, and that profit can then be used to fund your more artistic interests. Remember, in this world it’s produce or perish: there is no room for snobbery.
With that said, this isn’t the end-all be-all to merchandise design. If it was, then merely putting the sprites of your characters would be good merchandise (it isn’t).
On top of this artistic consideration, you must import a pragmatic consideration about what exactly you’re selling. Take shirts for example: Our two best shirts are Olivia’s shirt and The “ใฏใ็ฉ่ช” hoodie. Despite being miles apart in design, both serve a specific purpose: When worn on the body they accent something about the wearer (in both cases, an appreciation for the game “I Wani Hug That Gator”) and aren’t tacky.
The concept of tackiness is why you can’t just throw random PNGs of characters on a shirt and sell it to people. For our purposes, tackiness can be quantified as the lack of integration into usual norms and tastes, or more simply: a lack of appeal to normies. Just plastering a character onto your body is going to confuse normal people, they don’t know this character, or why they’re there, or anything like it. They can’t even begin to guess why you appreciate and they can’t even appreciate how it looks on a base-level “its pleasing looking” level. The character won’t mesh well with other outfits as well. It stands out because normal people can’t appreciate the design when they lack context.
The best middle ground is what we call “Subtle Gamer Merch”: This is merchandise that you don’t need to understand the context of to somewhat appreciate. To take an example:
This shirt here was actually designed very similarly to a shirt our developers found in the real world. It was two skeletons, clearly male and female, dancing. We took that idea, added a good moment from Wani to it, and then shipped it out. Even if you’ve never played Wani, you can understand that this design is symbolic of some kind of dance or love.
The “ใฏใ็ฉ่ช” hoodie has an interesting grid pattern and Japanese look to it, two things people recognize and can appreciate if they enjoy grids and kanji characters. The Olivia’s T-shirt is the shirt of a fictional band, which band shirts are common and people usually recognize “oh, that’s a logo of some kind” when they see it, so they can understand it.
If you did play Wani and saw these shirts, you’d understand the shirt much better, but if you haven’t it still works fine as a nice enough and won’t make you tacky looking.
Finding the happy medium between “reference to your work” and “not tacky” will depend a lot on the items you’re selling. The Olivia plush doesn’t have to do this as much as most plushes stay in people’s room. It’s a personal item that doesn’t need as much social consideration put into it outside of “looking like a good enough translation of the fictional character to a real medium”.
If you want to test if your design is good or not, imagine someone using it, where they would use it, and how people will look at that person for using it (if they are looking). A shirt is an easy example, just think of a member of your audience going somewhere with it on. Would you mock them if you saw it? If you would, scrap the design and do something else.
This approach is very pragmatic and should make things that your fans want. They want to show off their love for something in a way that doesn’t make them look like a total tool. Don’t make them have to turn to custom Etsy commissions to do it, be the person who profiteers off your own work first. You may think you’re entitled to that due to copyright, but you realistically aren’t, and we will get into that.
Finally, just as some bullet point advice in regards to ideas and design:
- When your audience likes something in particular, pay attention.
- Do not be afraid to ask your audience for what they want, they will tell you. Some of their suggestions will be insane or uneconomical, but the core of their desires can be found through just asking.
- You know your audience better than any outsider does. If someone outside your sphere is saying things that don’t sound right, don’t listen to them.
- Research what other people are doing that’s successful, take what works, and then put your own spin on it.
- Re-use game assets if its not tacky. The Damien shirt and the Olivia shirt both did this to great success. It’s free advertising, low effort, but people will like it.
How the merch store (and patron blog) came to be
The merch store started at first with the patron system so that we could monetize working on our games. We initially set up some software for it, the software sucked, and then the project largely died. Later on, we discussed doing some kind of merchandise after seeing an internal developer make some stickers. We commissioned some sticker designs from an internal artist of ours and had those on stand by. The project for merchandise and the patron blog almost went nowhere until a developer (re)discovered the hard work and documentation by the guys at NerdCity:
These videos gave us a lot of insight into the process of making merchandise, and more importantly, keywords to research. The primary one was “Print-on-Demand”, which a manufacturing term for only making a product when an order is placed.
You don’t get the advantage of bulk discounting, but you don’t have to pay inventory costs as well with this system. This is a great move for groups with low amounts of capital, like us, who wanted a way to profit off our brand more passively.
Print-on-Demand manufacturers usually handles warehousing and inventory management as well, so that left us with only a couple jobs: keeping the site to purchase on online, quality control, customer complaint management, design, and advertising. That’s a lot of work still, but it was all things that we could manage. We pay them to source the product, put ink on shirts, and to ship the items.
All you have to do to grantee profitability is ensure that the price of your merchandise is higher than the cost of production and make sure people are buying it to cover the costs of keeping the site maintained and customers happy.
From this point onward, we found a manufacturer online that was easy to work with, downloaded their templates, and got to work on designing, applying the principles discussed earlier. A programmer was put on the task of making both the patron blog and store using WordPress, Paid Membership Pro, and Woocommerce. Payments themselves are collected using Stripe so that people can input their debit cards in a secure way. Finally, we linked up this site to our manufacturer so that they get the orders as they’re placed.
Lots of print-on-demand manufacturers make plugins that integrate with Woocommerce to automate order forwarding, so if you do this, ensure you look into that. Furthermore, there are many hosting providers who will sell you WordPress hosting with few restrictions that you can look into so you don’t have to deal with the harsh technical back end. Still, technical knowledge will go a long way to ensure your site stays online and even get custom additions put into it.
Considerable effort went into making the site feel good to use. We took the time to research many store fronts, primarily Amazon, to ensure the site was easy to use and made people feel safe when inputting their debit card information. Despite Stripe being very secure, most people donโt understand that as the back end, so if a sketchy web form is asking for your debit card information, theyโre not going to put it in.
Even so, there’s still a lot to be desired with the site, primarily with the technical make-up of it. Feedback is essential to squashing these issues, so please let us know how the site can be further improved.
The designs were something we experimented with, putting out quite a few things to see what worked and what didn’t. Clothing was the overwhelming winner on profit, with a select few dominating our profits. We took notes for this for our second merchandise run.
Know your place and what you offer
Some artists get a very bad mindset when it comes to business. Since they’re the guy who draws the pretty pictures or writes the nice stories, they think they’re entitled to easy money for no effort. They think that just because copyright law “protects them”, they’re going to make money off whatever they created. This couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, I’d wager that the “safety net” provided by the copyright system creates a bad form of brain-worms that keeps artist from viewing their role properly.
Anyone talking about “copyright infringement” when it comes to your work is either entrenched into the system to afford the legal and PR nightmare of a lawsuit to enforce such a claim, or is poor and stupid. You must ignore their advice and understand what they’re talking about:
Copyright enforcement is a civil manner. If someone encroaches on your monopoly on pixels, then you get to take them to court and demand damages out of them. That involves hiring lawyers, tracking down infringers, and hoping whoever is profiteering off the work you did is within a jurisdiction that cares about that legal entitlement. This provision is often paraded around by people who never have interfaced with the legal system as some kind of weapon against “big companies hurting the little guy”, but given that the artists who say this nonsense are poor and would just be out-spent and bogged down in the legal system, we doubt that anything ever comes from this when it comes to pursuit of action.
For example, someone is selling stickers of Olivia on a site like Red Bubble. People who see them may want to buy them just because they’re interested in Olivia. What should a business man do?
A bad businessman would see this as an opportunity to throw around DMCAs or other legal threats and paperwork, tasks that cost time, money, and just end up removing products available to your customers. You waste time, your customers don’t get merchandise of products they like, and the producer loses money. This is a net negative for everyone and, professionally speaking, you would be a total, unlikable prick for doing this.
A good businessman, however, will see this as an opportunity. People want stickers and you, if you did your work right, have an audience to market them to. You have more outreach than these people through your name and can take advantage of that to get more money. You can make unique designs, find a manufacturer, and then sell and advertise all in your own sphere. The people selling before you worked as market testing so you can get ahead. In this situation, everyone wins: They get to keep their listings up and make some money from it. You get to spend time on making a better product that sells more rather than busying yourself with paperwork that will net you $0. Finally, your customers get more options for merchandise, which they will appreciate.
In summary, you will be out-competed in merchandise if you do not participate and copyright enforcement is an ineffective and hostile way of preventing that. It’s a better use of your time to pretend that copyright doesn’t exist and instead focus on ways of producing, marketing, and distributing competing merchandise instead.
Even if you’re still riding on the bigger companies playing nice with the system without enforcement, they’re there to fleece you of your money too. Companies operating licensing deals are just there to buy brand recognition and free advertising from you. You’re likely going to have to sign a way a good chunk of the profit from sales to make it worth the other party’s time. They’re there to take advantage of your lack of agency in running your business by providing you comfortable, lower amounts of money. Yes, they will handle a lot of the stuff for you, but you won’t be making as much money. If you want to fund your art, you need that money. You cannot let other people fleece you because you don’t want to put in the effort.
Instead of relying on this antiquated system, you have to adapt to the landscape and dip your toes personally into the world of merchandising. This means providing a real, convenient service that real people want as close as possible to being directly by you. This cuts out many middle men who will want to take money from you, often percentage amounts. If you do end up working with someone who wants a cut on your project, ensure that the value they provide is always more than the service’s cost.
As an example from us: The best way we found to make money is to host a store online yourself you can take orders from (so you don’t owe Etsy a percentage cut), to design your merchandise yourself (so you don’t have to pay percentage royalties to someone who did), to then contact a manufacturer who can make your design real (ideally only paying for the cost of production, labor, and profit, not in percentages), and from there to warehouse and ship it through a third party to your customers (so you don’t have to spend 60 hours a week packing boxes). This is how we made every item on our store and it has been very profitable for our size.
Yes, this will be difficult. Yes, this means you have to figure out a whole lot of technical stuff. Yes, this means you’re going to have to call and work with people for months on projects. Yes, in some cases, you will have to put your own money at risk to make something happen. If you want to actually turn a profit, you have to eat some risk and do some work, but we will show you what we did so you can learn from it.
THE Olivia Plush
The Olivia plush was always something that we wanted to do, but work on it seriously started after someone posted this tweet in our group chat:
We saw this tweet and decided that we wanted in on the plush market. That’s only slight hyperbole; we knew that people liked Olivia and that plushes did well, so we started researching the topic, mainly, “How do you get someone to make a plush economically?”.
While researching, we were actually contacted by Makeship for an offer from them to make our plush. We were very interested in it at first until we heard their revenue split, as a direct quote from the offer we were sent:
We retail our plushies for 29.99, and have a tiered creator payment system; if you sell between 200-399 plushies, you will receive 10% of Net Retail Sales (this small order is a high cost on our end to manufacture), and if you sell 400+ units, you will receive 30% of Net Retail Sales.
Furthermore, all plushes were only retailed once, so if we wanted to do another version of the plush, we would have to do some kind of alterations (such as a glow in the dark version or something similar).
That being said, the people at Makeship were very kind to us and spent a lot of time discussing this with us, but they were very firm on their business model and there wasn’t much room for negotiation. We opted for another manufacturer because of this.
Makeship’s model seems to be targeted more at people who want an easy ride to make a plush with low amounts effort and with no upfront costs to the people they contact. They advertise themselves as handling a lot of the heavy lifting when it comes to making the plushes, and given that their business still operates as of writing, it seemingly works.
We didn’t go down the route they offered us because we were willing to eat a lot of risk, put up a good chunk of money we had to pay for the plush’s design and manufacturing, and wanted to make a lot of money per-plush.
In fact, when comparing the two manufacturers, the one we went with and Makeship, we were able to tell how much more money we would have made doing it ourselves. We made some charts for it:
Example: 0.4 would be 40%
Working directly with a proper manufacturer rather than working through Makeship’s artists and then to a manfuacturer gave us quite a bit more profit-per-plush. Furthermore, the more plushes we bought, the more bulk discounting we got. This was not a feature at all with Makeship’s pre-ordering system.
This is not to say that Makeship is in way swindling or scamming people, their terms are quite clear and their sales people very responsive to questions about those terms, but doing charts and math like these will help you make a more informed and proper decision about what you want.
In fact, we had a pro and con sheet for both Makeship and the alternative manufacturer to compare the traits of both to see what their strengths and weaknesses were. The overall opinion was that the alternative manufacturer was going to be superior if we put a lot of effort in and Makeship would have been superior if we wanted to put less effort in. We were willing to put in the effort to make the money, so we went with the alternative manufacturer.
Designing
Being willing to put in the effort did not mean that putting in the effort was in any way fun, enjoyable, or easy. In fact quite the opposite. The main hurdle was communicating changes from our artists, to the American side of production, and then to the Chinese. Things got lost in translation a lot, and we had quite a few blunders that required us to get much harsher on both sides during production.
The plush went through many revisions, designs, and updates. The two big concepts were “Fumo” and “Flat Gator”
Flat Gator (Version 1):
Flat Gator (Version 2)
Fumo (Version 1)
Fumo (Version 2)
We ended up going with the Fumo (Version 2) version, seeing that this style of plush was rather popular and more conventional.
Early in development, we wanted to give her a wheel chair as a form of stand, but we couldn’t actually source one. Our plush manufacturer did not have the resources to produce it, we couldn’t find anything ready made in production, and contacting another manufacturer would have added more headache and cost to the project.
A choice was made to make the shirt and hoodie removable so she could be repaired and also for customization reasons. We think that if you buy a product that’s going to cost you an entire 30 dollars, you should be permitted to easily modify it and repair it, especially since this item may never be sold again.
Certain details in our mock up didn’t make it over, some ones were physically impossible (primarily the front face of the snout just being flat like that). All in all, this initial design did translate into reality, but it took a lot of work and a lot of cutting corners. If we were to do it again, we would 3d model the plush first.
As an example of a struggling design, Meet Swamplivia: Our affectionate and lovable gas station weed smoking failed abortion. Her lopsided eyes and haphazardly stuck together hair being a product of the Chinese side of manufacturing not listening to instructions, or not being relayed them properly. This type of problem happened many times in development and lead to more blunders like this.
Often times, exceptional problems required exceptional solutions. Swamplivia was primarily a problem of both direction and communication. To remedy this, the CEO of Autism in Cavemanon painstakingly drew out what her head should look like at all angles, with fixed eyes and everything to just make her look as we intended. Effort like this was just apart of the cost of production for doing it yourself.
Providing this sheet is when we decided to get stern with them, reminding them about the money on the line, telling them that the plush looked bad for the time in-between revisions, and that we needed change, fast.
The sternness worked. We went from a creature of the night to the gator you know and love. The way this happened is the American-side of production had their CEO (its a small company) work more diligently with the Chinese side to ensure that what we requested happened.
One of the greatest flaws we had during development, outside of inexperience and a lack of forethought into the physicality of the design, was an unwillingness to be stern. Not wanting to step on toes is a usual courtesy, however, we put money on the line for this project up front. If this failed, we would be out thousands. Our customers (you) would be disappointed with a bad product as well.
We had to learn that a small amount of professional rudeness is a necessary step into getting what is necessary done. Without it, badness will be tolerated at both you and your customer’s expense.
The single greatest problem we had during development was the simple lack of taste the Chinese side of production had joint with a lack of questions being sent our way. Often times they would come back with half the requests we asked for, but executed in such a way as to be unacceptable. It was always one step forward, but two steps back, hence why some tactical pushiness was employed to get the Americans to bring us a very huggable Olivia.
Iteration
Much of the plush’s history was split between the “Swamplivia” and “Huggable” phase of working, often with small details being sent back-and-forth week-by-week to get us to where we are now. Most of the communication on story can be summarized with some images of development during the time and some notes, so that will be the format for this segment:
May 21st 2024 we got the first images after payment. They send us some images of the plush early on to see if they were in the general right direction, specifically regarding hair shape.
May 27th 2024, we were sent the first look at a complete version. Critiques were submitted on the hair’s thinness, the shape of the eyes, the fingers, and the hoodie. One big request we had was to use “Minky” for the hair fabric instead of the thin stuff they used.
June 12th 2024 we got to see another unfinished version of the plush with the hair fabric details and improved fingers. We also got a more-square like snout shape to align with what Olivia’s design actually is. We thought that this may be a good design going forward, but that hope was shattered when…
June 21st 2024, Swamplivia was born. Since she got an entire segment of her own, we won’t repeat ourselves. The only major note was this was not the ONLY iteration of Swamplivia, we tried to fix her…
July 8th 2024, Swamplivia had an attempt at fixing, and this is when we actually ran out of patience and saw the writing on the wall that this type of design was simply not working. This is when we started to become impatient due to a lack of communication on direction.
July 17th 2024, The “Huggable” arc begins as detailed previously. This segment also got its own segment, as the American got involved to fix it.
July 23rd 2024 we got the mouth embroidered. However, the mouth did not look good. There was a gap in Olivia’s hair as well that was not great, but this was a carry over and we hoped would be fixed soon.
August 20th 2024 we finally get update on the plush to see that, largely, nothing changed. We were again working with the Chinese rather than the Americans again.
On another note, this is the time we called them to find out the logistics of doing “American-only” production next time around. We have dedicated a small segment of this article to that conversation near the end.
September 5th 2024 we were actually shown communication with the Chinese side between them and the Americans. They told our American guy “The teeth can’t achieve the same effect as the customer[‘s drawing]. Drawings are different from plush toys”. They did not tell us specifically what was wrong with our drawing though that made it impossible, so we were shooting in the dark for what changes to make to make it work with physicality.
During much of September as well, the factory was closed due to holidays. If you outsource anything ever, please ensure you know the holidays of the place you outsource to.
September 26th 2024 It had been a month of near radio silence and, after being pushy yet again with the Americans, we were put into direct contact with the Chinese rather than working through our representative on the American side.
Apparently, the Chinese were confused as to which mouth style was desired, the left or right. Clearly, we went with the right.
October 7th 2024, with direct contact with the Chinese, we were able confirm the mouth style. This revision was largely unimportant due to being before the final one. However, we had a moment in development that exemplified the kind of problems in development we were facing regarding literal interpretations of requests.
We asked for the Chinese side of manufacturing to put the plush on a turn table for us so we may see all sides of it. They said they had lost the power cord to the turn table. We told them to send a video when they fixed the power issue.
They decided instead to send us a video of them turning it on the turn table by hand. You can see this video on the left.
October 18th 2024, after only a slight adjustment to the design, making the left and right part of the hair symmetrical, we decided the design was finalized.
All the work, despite the frustration, was within the development window we expected. It was not a perfect experience, but it was far from a negative one, especially since the plush has been quite the success on sales so far.
“Why not just manufacture in The United States?”
A lot of the pain so far has been due to having to go through different layers of production. The United States can give us what we want, the Chinese can’t, so why even bother with the Chinese? Why not just make everything in The United States?
The majority of the reason why we personally can’t is due to the American manufacturer not having as much access to fabrics and the lack of expensive equipment to do precise cuts. The company is simply priced out of such investments. Furthermore, the cost of skilled American labor is much higher than skilled Chinese labor, with the CEO citing an American designer costing 70 to 90k to have.
We also suspect, but cannot confirm due to a lack of data, that wages in the USA and China are different enough to be an economic factor as well.
The best solution for those wanting to have Americans in the process is a hybrid one: Precise fabric work is done in China. The Americans handle the stuffing, quality assurance, and warehousing. This is the model the manufacturer we contacted used and suggested us to use. We wish we could do 100% American-made to ease the pains of production, but reality necessitates we work with the Chinese.
Advertising and Shipping?
As of writing, we have yet to finish advertising and shipping the plush, because of that, we think it’d be best to wait until that’s done before commenting on the subject. So, because of that, the public should expect a smaller “Part 2” that covers what we did for these two.
Yet another banger read. A perfect mix of industry insight on the creative and logistic sides of the matter.
Feels like I just downloaded a resume into my bones after reading this
>A perfect mix of industry insight on the creative and logistic sides of the matter
There’s basically no information on the internet that’s easy to consume that actually covers this topic in depth (outside of those Nerd City videos), which annoyed me, so I insisted that we write this.
Logistics especially gets neglected in the few write ups I have found despite it being vital in the production of literally anything. I hope that when the plush finally ships we can cover warehousing and advertising in a lot more depth, since those two are some of the hardest things to deal with.
The chinese mind cannot comprehend the anthro reptile