2023 in Review

What an epic first year we’ve had!

Our figures arrived right at the end of December ‘22, so it’s safe to say we’ve learnt a lot in the last year. So, here’s where we’re at and a few musings:

Collectable London

Following preorders and a successful Kickstarter campaign, we launched our shop in Feb with the first five OGs. Some first editions are nearly sold out now (stay tuned to find out more…) which is amazing, so we’re already thinking about second editions.

We’ve got two new figures in production at the moment - Royal Guard and Elizabeth I. The packaging has had an upgrade and the figures are looking awesome, woohoo. These will be sent out first to our amazing Kickstarter backers that made it possible, and will then be added to the shop later in the Spring.

Licensing

2023 brought along a crash course in licensing for us.

We can certainly all agree that Apple corps should green-light our Beatles figures (fingers crossed it will happen one day) and we’re so thankful for everyone’s comments on the designs we poured our hearts and souls into.

We also sunk many hours into designs for a Thunderbirds collaboration which sadly went south, and we’ve had our eyes opened to the huge costs and risks associated to licensing deals.

All this to say that we’re incredibly excited to have our first collaboration under way now! We’re branching out of London and we can’t wait to tell you more.

Retail

It’s been a slower process than we expected, but hoping to gain more traction this year! We really want to build on our retail presence as we’ve got so much global interest and this will help to make us available without the import duties and extra taxes. Please put us in touch with any stores you think would be a great fit for our figures.

We’ve been very thankful to some lovely independent shops, Shakespeare’s Globe, HMV, and Abbey Road Studios for giving us a shot. Sherlock and Shakespeare belong in book stores, and we can see the whole collection working really well in Museums and Galleries… so the hustle continues.

We have learned that traditional British retailers aren’t looking for something new. A key aspect to our concept was to reinvent the souvenir and improve the level of design and originality being offered to visitors of places like the Tower of London, Hampton Court Palace, Shakespeare’s Birth Place etc…. but their buyers are not interested / don’t get it. It feels like a missed opportunity to add some new energy to places of historic interest, but that’s ok because we’re slowly finding our audience ourselves.

Small Business

You hear it all the time… it’s a lot of work and a major rollercoaster, but SO rewarding.

Did we ever imagine spending our evenings and weekends researching freight forwarding? Trying our hand at marketing and advertising? Nope… But, you can’t sit around waiting for other people to make your dreams come true, can you? So here we are trying to learn all of the things that make a business work. So far, we’ve certainly seen improvement in our confidence, resilience and ability to laugh it off when things don’t go our way.

With a number of systems now in place, we hope to have more time for creativity and experimentation this year. We’ve had so many people reach out about helping in different areas so count on us getting in touch ;)

Lots of love,

Caitie & Joe
Co-Founders