Another fun stream yesterday, leaving me quite enthusiastic about the current build. Lil’ preview in today’s logo.
What’s funny is the thing I’m exited about is this build is something a bit new from the shop. I do try to add new models when I can, but prototyping is a lengthy process that I try to save for holiday breaks. It’s just so happened to work out that I’ve had a bit of time for small, iterative prototyping – some built on older work – over the past few weeks. The results have been some of my favourite builds ever.
And the thing about that is it’s pretty much the opposite to what I had planned for this year. Every year I try to get a sense of what’s happening and where I should focus my efforts for O:P. Looking at the dismal economy going into 2023 and seeing how slow late 2022 was, I assumed that this was going to be a very lean year as folks trim sails in hard times. Puppets tend to be a luxury item.
I can ride out a few phases like that so I decided my efforts this year should be on planting seeds. We’ve got something good and healthy going with O:P, so the goal should be to try getting the word out and bringing in more people. As always, it’s a balancing act with available time so I assumed I wasn’t going to be doing any new models this year until the end.
So, how’s that plan going? Well, I left Twitter and Facebook, so there’s considerably fewer channels for social media. Plus, in the past three weeks I’ve done or am in the process of doing three different styles of puppet I haven’t done before. So much for plans.
The funny part? The O:P community is actually growing. The Discord (join the Discord) is more active than ever, the build streams are always well attended, the podcast (listen to the podcast) has a healthy listener base and generally things are ticking along. Even sales, which not spectacular, are better than I assumed they would be.
Someone once said that life is what happens while you’re making other plans. True in life, as in puppets. Plans are generally there as a navigation aid, but sometimes you gotta go with the flow. Hey look, coffee.