I wanted to take a moment to let you know about our progress on these things. I'll address each.
1) We have already removed the large game box as the "default" box from our system. This should encourage designers to choose a box that best fits their game, rather than having the system suggest too large a box.
Ironically removing the box has caused great confusion for game designers, but having it there causes problems for Tarotists. I'm going to leave the box out of the designer by default for you guys, but I'm working on some changes to make it easier for Game Designers to put them back in, so hopefully that doesn't cause any confusion for you.
2) We have ordered some smaller shipping containers which should be less weight and less wasteful. The new shipping containers are the smallest the USPS recommends we use based upon our shipping: 7x5x1.5. These are more than 50% smaller than our current smallest shipping container for First Class and Parcel Post shipments, and are roughly the same size as a USPS Priority Small Flat Rate Box.
We've seen a tremendous uptake of these new boxes, mostly due to Tarotists. You asked for it, and you've been using it, so thank you for that.
3) We are going to order some additional cloth bags. This will allow us to offer higher quality cloth bags at cheaper prices. In addition, we're going to allow those cloth bags to be used as packaging for your decks. As many of you point out, these make better packages than a box for the Tarot community.
We've been hard at work on our new web site, so we haven't had time to take care of this yet, but we will have these available in our parts shop this spring, and will have them available to be used as packaging no later than the summer.
4) Early next year we'll be adding a "Tarot" section to our site that specifically promotes the selling of Tarot decks. This will make it easier to find all the quality Tarot decks on our web site. We will also specifically showcase tarot decks in other parts of our site in order to increase sales for all of you.
We've officially added the new Tarot section.
https://www.thegamecrafter.com/tarot
5) We are looking into a new technology to cut Tarot cards that may be cheaper and more accurate. No guarantees there of course. But we're evaluating this new technology to see if it can offer either an improvement in price or accuracy.
We demo'd the new technology, and it does a very nice job of cutting the tarot cards, so we purchased it. It produces cleaner edges with slightly better accuracy. Unfortunately it was very expensive so we aren't able to provide any better pricing per deck for single deck quantities. However, it is much faster for cutting larger runs of decks, so we're now able to offer up to 40% discount on Tarot decks for large runs. Bulk pricing starts at 5% at 25 copies, and goes all the way up to 40% at 500 copies.
6) Before the year is out we will introduce a new 90-card Jumbo-sized Tuck box to give a better box option for decks like Zombie Apocalypse Tarot so that they can still have a printed box without using the Large or Medium game box we currently offer.
Instead of releasing a jumbo tuck box, we produced an even better box which we call the small pro box.
You can read about it here:
http://news.thegamecrafter.com/post/39660974558/say-hello-to-the-small-pro-box-this-is-a-new-line
7) We're working on a jumbo booklet that will allow you to create very large Meanings books for your divination decks.
We released this booklet. You can read about it here:
http://news.thegamecrafter.com/post/37641258527/announcing-jumbo-booklets-for-some-games-the
8) We're putting together a video for designers explaining why it is important to choose smaller packaging for decks to lessen the shipping costs to consumers, especially those consumers over-seas.
Now that we've released our new web site, we're working on updating all of our videos, and this will be one of the new videos we create.
Anyway, I hope you can see that we've been working hard to provide a better product and better experience for the Tarot community. Please let me know if you have any questions.
