4-inch Raver Domos Glow Under Blacklight!

OK, now, to be perfectly honest with you, Dark Horse did NOT just email me telling me that these are Raver Domos... but they GLOW under blacklight!!! And I swear, the last rave I went to, some of the kiddies were wearing Domo hats, so forgive me for making this association. And I'm listening to trance right now, soooo.... it's Raver Domo. You can't tell me otherwise. 

These are 4-inch Black Light Domos that come in Pink, Blue, Green, Orange, Yellow, Red and Purple. Price will be $14.99 each and they'll hit stores in March of 2012.

Shot at The Revival, at The Morgan, in Brooklyn. Actually a fun night!

Wanna open a web store to sell stuff? Storenvy is FREE.

Before I get started, I want to let you know that I have not been paid or compensated in any way for writing this blog post. In fact, I do not use Storenvy myself- I use Volusion. For a big shop with hundreds of items and lots of flexibility, I LOVE Volusion. I highly recommend it. But, Volusion costs a fair chunk of change every month. Lots of my artist friends and contacts do not have the money or technical knowledge to open and run a Volusion store. In fact, many artists I know either don't have bank accounts, or don't have I.D., or don't have functional computers, so running a big, expensive web shop is entirely out of the question. And most of the artists I know hate using their computers anyway.

But it's a big, wide world out there, and it's tough being an artist. They gotta find those clients and collectors wherever they can. The next sale could come from a collector in Poland or Australia. So really, any artist these days does in fact need a web store, however simple, so that he or she can reach people on the other side of the globe. If you make stuff, you need a web store.

And, it would be so nice if it were free to set up and run. And easy.

Right.

So a couple of weeks ago, I got a cold (unsolicited) email from a guy named Adam who works at Storenvy. Actually, right before Christmas, which was bad timing for me. It's a busy season with lots of packing and shipping and no time for people I don't know, talking to me about stuff I don't need or want. Adam wanted to tell me about Storenvy's new marketplace for Designer Toys, and to quote him directly, "I figured a lot of your readers might be interested in setting up their own online stores to sell their toys, and since we are free, why not, right?"

I was like RIIIGHT, sure buddy. I put him off and told him I'd get back to him after the holiday. Also, I thought it would be funny to light his ass up, so I scheduled an actual phone call with him, with the intention of showing him exactly why Storenvy sucks ass and why my Volusion store rocks.

Well, it didn't exactly go down like that... I prepared some questions and took notes on a half hour phone call, and I didn't exactly get to light Adam up like I thought. Here's what I found out about Storenvy:

It's actually fucking free. Seriously. I was very skeptical, so I probed further: Storenvy's primary funding at this point has been provided by investors. Investors will eventually want some sort of return (duh) but for now they are happy to let the Storenvy community grow and flourish. Monetization will come later, and I am guessing that will come in the form of ads in the sidebars (like Facebook is doing, and like Google has done for years). I bet starting a store on Storenvy will remain free and they'll just sell ad space on their site to other companies.
Storenvy currently makes a tiny bit of money on paid extras, like if you want a custom domain for your shop ($5/month) or the ability to make coupons and discounts for your store ($3/month). Neither is very expensive. Even if you get both, it's only $8/month!


You can have an unlimited number of items in your store. You can also have "variants" in each product's options if you have, say the same shirt in different sizes, or 5 similar custom toys with different colors or numbers, or whatever.

You can have 5 images per item in your shop.

It's easy to set up. I just started a Storenvy account in 5 minutes, just to know what the hell I was talking about when I made this blog post. Go to storenvy.com and click on Join in the upper right corner. You can link your FB and Twitter accounts if you want to A) share what you find with other people or B) find shops and account owned by people you know.
From there you click on your Settings tab and click on Create a Free Store on the left. It's so simple, even a caveman could do it.

Storenvy takes Paypal as a form of payment. Likewise, if your customers want to pay with a credit card, Paypal will be the payment processing gateway. (This is the same setup I use on Tenacious Toys.) One of the reasons they're using Paypal is it's the only payment gateway that allows buyers to consolidate items from different shops/sellers into one purchase. I thought this was brilliant: you can surf around the Designer Toy Marketplace and add toys from different Storenvy shops into your cart, and then check out once with all the items in your cart. Sorta like Amazon, but more intimate. I suppose you still get charged multiple shipping charges since items from different sellers will ship from different places, but still, I can see this being a selling point and a time-saver as well.

The Designer Toy Marketplace on Storenvy

Need more convincing? SKET has a Storenvy shop. So does my buddy Matt Anderson. So does Lift Detroit, Jinxed from Philly, Yosiell Lorenzo, Bad Applez Inc.... the cool thing about this set-up, actually is it fosters more of a sense of community than Big Cartel. The Designer Toy Marketplace is a place you can go and see a variety of different toys from shops and artists, all in one spot. I sorta wish I had known about this 5 years ago, coulda saved a little money starting my shop. Adam told me that Storenvy shops get 15% of their traffic from people surfing around the Storenvy Marketplaces. This is blanket, across-the-board general figure for all Storenvy stores, that may or may not apply specifically to shops in the Designer Toy Marketplace, but still... I don't get any traffic from any sort of community marketplace. I gotta go out and get my traffic from Google or Facebook or whatever....

SKET's Storenvy shop

Matt Anderson's Storenvy shop

On the technical side, I understand that Big Cartel has issues with abandoned carts... like, if an artist makes 10 toys, and they all get added to carts, the item looks sold out in their shop, even if all 10 customers have not completed their purchases. This is irritating. Storenvy solves this by booting the items out of abandoned carts after 3 hours. If you add something to your cart and proceed to Paypal, but then you don't complete the check out process, that item leaves your cart after 3 hours. This saves the artist the hassle of figuring out what went wrong. You can put your 10 items up for sale and forget about them. Check back in 4 hours and all customers will have either checked out immediately, or gotten their 2nd chance to grab one of the items after the 3 hours mark passes and the slackers have their carts emptied.

Finally, if you want a more fancypants shop, you can edit the html and CSS behind the Storenvy shop to make it suit your needs. In this way, you can fully integrate it into your existing website, so the website visitor has a seamless experience. Check out Capitlclothing and then click on SHOP at the top, which takes you to their Storenvy shop- using the same headers in each spot gives you the impression that it's all on the same website. Pretty slick.

If you don't have any technical prowess on the computer at all, you can STILL make your Storenvy shop look nice by changing the header image and the colors, like this shop.

Now, like I said, I'm not getting paid for this, and I just wrote a hella long blog post about some shit that doesn't exactly apply to me, so I'm gonna wrap this up. I'm hungry. If you make toys or art, or you have a very small company and you sell stuff, go check out Storenvy as a web store platform option. After poking thru all this info for quite a long time, I'd say it's a great choice as far as free web shops go.

Fuck eBay and their crazy-ass fees, and fuck Etsy for taking my friend Valerie G's custom Domo down for no reason. I'm gonna sell it myself. Idiots.

If you have any questions about opening your own shop, please feel free to NOT email me, but rather, email this dude Adam from Storenvy. His title at Storenvy is "Special Ops" which is way cooler than most job titles. And, Adam runs the Storenvy Facebook page.

Ultraman figures- should we get them?

Ultraman & Ultraseven

So one of our distributors just dropped this bombshell on us: they now have 6-inch Ultraman figures to sell to us!!! At $12.95 each, this is a lot of toy for the money! But, Ultraman is a little bit outside of my own personal area of expertise (vinyl & resin art toys) so I need to solicit a lot of feedback from you, our followers and readers. Should we get these Ultraman & Ultimate Monster figures? Please share liberally and leave a comment on this blog (or email us) if you think we should order. Also, tell us which figure(s) you'd be interested in buying.

Gomora

Alien Baltan II

King Joe

Alien Nackle

Vakishim

Rampage Toys SF58 Exclusive "Clear X-ray Ugly"

SF58 Exclusive "Clear X-ray Ugly", originally uploaded by rampage.toys.

The beauty of Japanese-made soft vinyl toys is that they can be created in crystal-clear vinyl. Still not that common, with most American companies having their vinyl toys made in China in opaque vinyl. Rampage Toys is taking full advantage of their new home and the micro-manufacturing that happens in Japan.

Rampage Toys SF58 Exclusive "Snowgon Ugly"

SF58 Exclusive "Snowgon Ugly", originally uploaded by rampage.toys.

If you are not familiar with the work of my friend Jon Malmstedt, this is his soft vinyl figure Ugly Unicorn. Jon recently moved from the US to Japan, and now he gets to have his toys made into sofubi. They're beyond beautiful. Lucky bastard.

Dave Bondi Possessed custom

Dave Bondi is the talented dude behind one of my favorite sculpts ever: the Luke Chueh Possessed figure. Dave is allowed to create custom resin pieces based on his sculpt, and they always come out so beautiful and interesting... we've been in touch with Dave lately and we're going to get him involved in a project. Stay tuned.

Ghast & Droid Munnys by Don P

Don P (aka Patrick Lippe) sends us images of his sweet custom 7-inch Kidrobot Munnys he calls Ghast & Droid. 

(Ghast is the one with the orange goggles, Droid has the purple apparatus in the middle of his face.)

You can keep up with Don P on Facebook, and check out his web store too!

SNEEK PEAK: A final WIP shot of Jeff Beck's Lion-O custom

Three Thundercats customs by Jeff Beck will be for sale in our shop soon!

Stomper DIY toy from Poland

In my continued effort to promote the global art toy community, I definitely have to make some decisions about what I cover here on this blog. I get a lot of emails from toy artists and creators, and often (like right now) they get way backed up as I attend to my primary mission: packing and shipping orders from our shop. When I get a free minute, I get a few blog posts up. I do have to be selective and honestly, I try to focus on cool stuff. The Stomper, a 3.5" tall vinyl DIY figure from Poland, is not really the most complex or cutting-edge DIY toy I've seen. However, Stomper's creator, Michael Nowak, put a lot of effort and info in the email he sent to us, and apparently he has U.S. distribution lined up through DKE Toys, so I say for his effort, he gets some page time on this blog.  Stomper will retail for $20 each.

I know my fellow bloggers Jeremy and Matthew might not agree on the level of selectivity I am employing here, but that's what makes the world go 'round.

Without further blah blah, I present to you the first Polish art toy, Stomper:

Figure is 8.7cm (3,4 inch) and comes in two colors-white and black. Is prepared for future conversion (DIY toy). You can paint, cut remodel. Was designed so that without any intervention could enjoy the eye, standing on a shelf in their original form. Cubic head firmly dissociates itself from the rest of the round body giving two planes to convert.
For the start there will be on market just the white version.

Who are Stompers? This is a serious Crooks ready to fight. Two colors, two characters!

History of Stomper:
Almost three years ago the first Stomper saw the light of day. It is true that he was only on paper in outline form, but foreshadowed the advent of something material. I wanted to design a very simple toy. Each successive draft, each succeeding model of the modeling was becoming simpler to finally become what it is-a very simple form with a ton of emotion cursed in white and black toy.Then the resulting versions of the cast from resin - ton of dust on the balcony and the unbearable smell of resin and silicone in the apartment. When my wife was preparing to give birth in the hospital I overlapped the first layer of paint on cast figurines. With 20 of resin figure I made Exhibition at the "Need for Street" (thanks Plastic Heart), then exhibition in Poznan (Breeder with Toys). Unfortunately the flap! Figure proved to be too expensive in production and had no chance on the Polish market (also had its drawbacks production)

It was a moment when I came to the conclusion that I will need to do it professionally. VINYL!
Shipping sketches, projects to China. The first prototype of the wax. The first prototype of the vinyl. Shipping to Polish and U.S.. Fight against EU rules. The huge joy after unpacking boxes.

So in short, looks like the story of the first Polish-a vinyl toy.
When I look at the sketches I wonder if at the start I realized that it takes me so long that I will not sleep so many nights thinking if that everything will be OK.
I know that having this knowledge, three years ago, and knowing the end result I would risk again. Pleasure to hold own product gives so much satisfaction.
With the support of his wife, family, friends- 200 Stompers comes to Poland (800 units in the U.S.) and now waiting for their new owners.