Stonemaier Games is very fortunate to have logistics virtuoso Alex Schmidt at the helm of a massive, ongoing, worldwide puzzle that combines demand forecasting and sales with every level of the supply chain.
Recently, Alex and I were emailing about a great post on BoardGameGeek by W. Eric Martin about the choice between selling directly to consumers vs selling to retailers (and various other options in between). We realized early into the conversation that it might be a chat that could offer value to other creators–at least to see the way one publisher thinks about these topics–so we scheduled a time to record it.
The result is the video below. While we don’t spoil anything for Stonemaier Games, we discuss a number of behind-the-scenes debates and considerations. Alex and I frequently debate if there are certain products that don’t make sense for retail and how we can better work with retailers for the products that are available to them.
The video is around 45 minutes, and I’ve timestamped the topics so you can jump to specific discussions. Some of my favorite parts of the chat are about demand forecasting (it’s always a guess, even for crowdfunders), the balancing act between selling everywhere vs building a strong webstore, and the increasing rarity of evergreen games.
I’d love to hear your thoughts here or in the comments on YouTube if you check out the video. Big thanks to Alex for taking the time to discuss these topics!
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Also read:
- Board Game Supply Chain Basics
- An Open Letter to Distributors and Retailers from Stonemaier Games
- The Current State of Retailers and Kickstarter (2019)
- How We Sell Some Inventory Directly to Local Retailers
- Evergreen Games: What Do They Have in Common? (2022)
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4 Comments on “The Great Puzzle of Logistics, Demand, and Retail”
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Hey Jamey and Alex, this is great info, thank you!
If you were start fresh, let’s say you plan on printing a maximum of 3,000 copies of your first game, what sort of reach would you shoot for?
At these lower figures, it makes international distribution seem like it’s not quite worth the effort, but I’m not sure how it all scales. Especially since you talk about your plan with retailers to automatically reserve 3 or 6 copies of your new releases if they’re members.
I know this is well below what Stonemaier operates at, but would love your thoughts!
If we were starting fresh, we would focus on serving worldwide consumers first (probably through a crowdfunding campaign) while setting the foundation to work with distributors/retailers. You can always make more copies of a game; it can ruin a company to have a ton of inventory that no one wants.
Awesome, thank you Jamey! I will certainly keep that in mind.