Gwynneth Paltrow’s Head

It is the year 2001. My first GAMA Expo. The last day of the Trade Hall.

If you’ve ever worked in larger industries, some of the sights and sounds of the hobby game industry’s premiere business to business event can seem a little strange. Grown men trying to strip stands of everything of value, their arms weighted down with booster boxes, boardgames and miniatures, jostling each other while business is still being conducted.

It was like being in a locust swarm.

Like, I got it.

These people had given up their time and earning potential to fly to Vegas, often leaving the store in the hands of a customer to keep it open while they tried to make bank, have a holiday, do a show. As I rode back to the airport in my taxi I passed the annual JCB convention. I wondered if constriction workers also asked if heavy plant machinery was up for grabs.

“You don’t want the hassle of taking that excavator on the plane with you buddy!”

I was from England. People handed me stuff. It had a name by then.

Swag.

The retailers of twenty years ago barely engaged with the trade hall. They didn’t go to the seminars. They were there for a holiday that they could write off on expenses, and as much swag as they could carry.

If you’d been a casual industry observer? You really would not have come away thinking our industry was even vaguely professional. Retailers were fighting over copies of the Palladium Roleplaying Game. It was a total scrum. People would waddle back to their hotel rooms, overloaded with stuff they hoped to resell. Some had brought trolleys, or other people to carry more bags. 

Enter the Box.

The Box was designed to reward retailers who attended publisher seminars. If you even had a baseline of professionalism you walked away with a pre-parcelled amount of swag to pay for your flight and hotel. It’s an attendance bribe, because GAMA was an organisation designed to serve up a smorgasbord of retailers for publishers to pitch their wares to.

Trust me – the year of two GAMA’s pretty much covered why this was its main function. And the Box was the way of delivering that.

Twenty years on and many retailers have considerably more professionalism than those heady days of jumpers for goalposts and people flying in just to score a Wizkids Dropshop. Hey, that was me too – Galactus, Dropship, Apocalypse Dragon.

This was because retailers back then were uber consumers. We were just hobbyists who had gone from poacher to gamekeeper. Bringing back the only Mechwarrior Dropship in the UK had value to our communities – and by extension to ourselves.

Initially the box had value too.

Yet pretty soon the products in the box started to vary in quality. Nobody is doubting the box still had financial worth – in fact it soon became two boxes, and then three, and then four. For a small store that’s like GAMA Christmas. But for a bigger store it’s almost certainly stock you already have. If its older stock, sometimes it is stock you – or the publishers – have already remaindered.

The year my boxes were shipped to my friends house in Vegas was the year I had to manually parse the contents of the box because it was now a) a year late and b) coming on the plane in my limited luggage capacity. Free isn’t free if you are paying money to stow it in a transatlantic hold or ship it – and somebody is paying that, so the things you put in the box are much more valuable to every part of the chain if they have some kind of value above and beyond the discount you got off you GAMA booth for their inclusion.

Here’s how you can make the box work for you. And for me. And ultimately for GAMA.

1. The product samples.

So, when I go to a catering and hospitality show folks are falling over themselves to give me free samples. New lines or new to me lines.

It’s not always so important that I like a line. Sometimes you want to see how a product behaves in the wild, so you have a CDU and you pop it out on your counter and see how excited people become.  This is often how bigger companies launch whole ranges.

Not everyone has the budget to do that. But let’s say you were Oink and had a relatively large selection of relatively small games and you wanted to break into a market. Sending a couple of hundred of your best selling games into stores in a CDU with reordering information stuck on the back might be the ‘in’ you need.

Every store sticks it on their counter, watches people pick the games up.

And buy them.

You’d then have the reordering information right there in front of you. Chances are within a week most stores would be placing an order. You have the mailing list to follow it up, you’ve potentially broken an entire market with one mailout that you didn’t even have to pay for.

Look, if I went to Proctor and Gamble and said I could get four hundred engaged businesses to put their new washing powder front and centre and it wouldn’t cost a million dollars in ad spend they’d bite my hand off.

That we don’t do more of this is criminal.

2. The sales tool.

GAMA is a great opportunity to take your catalogue, distil it down to the single product you have the best chance of success with this year and then drilling down and following through. Your direct to retailer seminar should concentrate on how to sell the product you want us to – tell us your elevator pitch. Give us the one minute demo – trust me if we are hand selling your product we need it in a small bite sized engagement chunk.  

Stop. Telling. Us. It’s. Great.

Look, we get it. It’s your game. But I can’t simply pull twenty games off my shelves and tell the customers they are great. I need to tell them why they are great. I need a one minute demo – and if you don’t think you can demo your game in one minute, Sarah Shah can.

(And I can too).

One minute.

Now, once you have told us how to sell it, you can tell us how to play it. And THEN you give us a copy. Canny stores will use the information you have given them to be able to handsell cases. And they will use that copy as a demo. Demo doesn’t always mean we play it with customers – sometimes we just open it and use it as a display. Sometimes it’s to teach the staff.

Now a canny store probably already did that. It cracked a demo of a game it knows it can handsell. Because handselling sells cases and just sticking it on the shelf might not even sell that one. We handsell mostly to casual gamers. Your standard hobbyist – the industries bread and butter – already knows what they want. They have influencers, Facebook groups and industry news to steer them towards games like Wingspan, Root or Gloomhaven.

Handselling is all about that casual gamer. So maybe that’s the sort of game you want to prioritise teaching us. And shipping us.

3. The event support.

So you are a cardgame or a miniatures line. The thing I absolutely most look forwards to every box is the Reaper paint and take. I was one of the original UK Organised Play stores, and things I can either run or turn into event prizes? They are awesome.

Here’s the thing about cardgames. One booster? One starter? These are statistically irrelevant unless we can source it in bulk. Back when he was at Bandai I used to badger James Tanaka for playmats because we couldn’t source them and I could turn them into prizes.

Yes, your boardgame promos are event support. Even if it’s just a purchase event.

You see, an event is anything a store can use to give it publicity.

And by extension you.

Every store wants the maximum number of people at its events – well maybe not now, but in general. We’re going to advertise, we’re going to shimmy, we’re going to sometimes even pay money to social media companies to increase our reach.

It’s the one thing I am always asking for when I am at GAMA – stuff to support events. Even if they are just purchase events – everyone who buys a game in store this weekend gets entered into a raffle, say.

Roleplaying game companies should send us beginners boxes. Since you all have living campaigns and organised play programs, give us something to kickstart that. Like, what I’d love to see Paizo do is give us a print run of the Pathfinder Society Introductory Module. Something we could have behind the counter, along with a beginner box for stores to run pick up and play games.

4. General stock.

Yup. I had six of Bunny Kingdom. Now I have seven.

Look, there is nothing wrong with sending free stock to somebody who already has stock. And if you send it to somebody who doesn’t have stock, well now they do. Maybe they now have Asmodee Top 40 AND Bunny Kingdom, and it’s the first game they ever took outside what they and every other store was handed on a plate.

This. Has. Merit.

(see point one above)

But you better make sure you have a way of following up and getting that store to reorder. Heck, you have an engaged store list of people who received your game. Sure, not every store wants to give you feedback, but you could do things to engage them – like ask them to send a picture of Bunny Kingdom on their shelves. Random draw to win one of each of your catalog.

This way you’re seeing two things – one, how big the store is, what their shelving is like – and by extension how professional they are. You are building a work with list of stores you need to have on your radar.

You are also seeing how your product fits into a store – or how store owners think it fits. Most of us have a filing system of sorts – ours was alphabetical, plus small games, plus BGG Top 10, plus solo, plus Asmodee Top 40, plus wargames, plus co-op and since COVID we’re also spread over multiple stacked tables primed for handselling with all our favourites and new releases. Seeing which other games are shelved near you helps you refine your own merchandising – why would they put that THERE? Maybe it’s the box size or their games are ordered by colour – saw a store do this once and it looked amazing. 

General stock box items are pretty boring for most big stores because we buy in cases. It’s just like a super expensive well travelled copy. Single copies when you deal in cases are always pretty depressing – either you already had plenty or you didn’t and it reminds you that you really needed another case.

(Still has merit and trust me we are grateful)

5. Remaindered stock.

Well, this is where it gets difficult. I don’t mean to be critical but if I’ve remaindered a product that turns up in the GAMA box I am like… so THIS is how little this company thought of me?

You. Know. Who. You. Are.

I get the need to remainder stock. You have a warehouse full and nobody wants it. You don’t.

And if you don’t I certainly don’t.

I get it. It’s a cheap and easy way of paying your ‘dues’. But this is because you are thinking of the box as a duty – an obligation – rather than an opportunity. All of us remainder stuff. You should offer this out to us at pennies on the dollar – trust me, if I stick a huge stack of boardgames out at 75% off they’ll pretty much all go. Sometimes we wrap them up as mystery Christmas gifts.

But what we don’t want is to have had that random remaindered shit prioritised and flown transatlantic to get to my door. At considerable expense. That shit don’t fly – apart from the fact that it most certainly did.

6. One offs

These are the absolute worst things. That one pack of 50 sleeves that I can’t order because they don’t distribute (or at least not internationally). That expansion for a game that’s out of print. Worse, getting a new edition (see 5 above). If I like a thing I need to be able to go back and get twenty of it.

If I can’t do that, you shouldn’t ship it.

Because now I’m losing sales because nobody cared enough to make sure they could translate what was in the box TO SALES. At that point I have to ask, what the heck are you even here for?

TCG’s are the worst.

TCG’s only work when you can get volume, in terms of players and in terms of sales. A TCG product in the box needs to be a stirge – it needs a long spike driven into the heart of a market, pumping in product and sucking out money.

Don’t send me a starter if I can’t get more.

Don’t send me a case of starters if I can’t get more. Because when a TCG bubbles, I need sixty.

Not six.

Most stores? They are Magic stores. They don’t always jump because they don’t always want to risk the community they have on a new game. But if you send a store like mine a demo deck? When I was running organised play for Bushiroad I sent out hundreds to any interested store. Magic Demo decks? I got through thousands.

If I am passing around one demo deck – or at least I hope, a pair – I need to source stock really quickly. Handselling a TCG is hard. There’s a play – commit – buy axis that is very, very short.

But…

7. Galactus was cool.

And I flew half way around the world just to be the first person in the UK to have one. If it is going to be a one off, it has to be drop dead cool.

A flagship item for a flagship store.

Part of me misses those days. I might not miss the scrum for swag. I certainly don’t miss being the quietly deferential British guy watching folks wheel away a year’s turnover in a suitcase. The industry has changed a lot.

But until now we’ve never really had this talk. About how retailers use the contents of the box. How  we view you and your expectation of us through those contents.

Remember it’s an opportunity, not an obligation.

A lot of smaller retailers are primarily Magic stores. The right product – and the right follow up – might be the perfect in for an entire product category with you as the cornerstone. The bigger the store, the more likely your box contents will just join general population on our shelves. But the more you think about what is in the box – what YOU put in, and what messaging you want to accompany it – the harder it will work for you.

And the harder we will too.

Because it can’t always be Gwynneth Paltrow’s head!