12 Months - 12 Yoyos.

It’s nuts. In the short term it’s bad business. There is no question that I'm competing with myself with so many releases. Few people can afford to buy a Rain City Skills yoyo every month. Especially with so many other amazing brands releasing yoyos.

In the short term.

This mad dash of releases is a long-term gamble. I’m trying to do 2 things.

Be active and get seen - a release a month with a wide range of shapes and styles means that there is something for everyone to talk about. I’m also able to collaborate with a bunch of company’s and post photos and content regularly without being repetitive.
Take a page from the Indy Book Publishing industry (see what I did there?) and create a backlist. The logic is this. If I spend money on an ad, or give away a couple yoyos to reviewers and contests to promote a yoyo release, I can quickly spend all the profit from the run of 100 yoyos.
But….
If I have a backlist of unique and interesting yoyos available, people aren’t just going to buy one yoyo and move on. They are at the very least going to browse the catalogue. They will see that there is a lot more to offer from this brand they just discovered. They might buy a second yoyo then and there, or they plan to come back and shop next payday.

In preparing for the publication of my books, I dove headfirst into learning about the indy book publishing industry. One of the keys to success seems to be backlist.

-If you spend $5 on ads to sell one book, you are losing money. But if that person buys the first book, and the next 5 in the series, now it's $1 per book and you are making good money.

The idea is next year to release bi-metals quarterly, with some restocks of monometals in between. Then I've got more time to properly promote each release. Once new people buy a yoyo, they'll go looking and find that I've got an available back-catalogue to shop through. I'm sure a few of you have fallen into that trap already ;)

If you have a minute, I’d appreciate it if you’d fill out this quick survey to help me make decisions about the brand moving forward.

CLICK HERE FOR THE SURVEY