This past week surveys and pre-orders were locked and Backerkit should have tried to charge the cards you have on file for shipping and any remaining balances! These funds haven't hit my end yet via Stripe, but I can see that this was processed without issue for the vast majority of you. It looks like only 14 cards were declined or errored - if that's you, please be sure to get your card updated or otherwise sorted! I of course need the shipping funds in order to get these little guys into your hands.
8 of you still have not filled out your surveys. You are still able to do so, but please please complete them as soon as possible. Folks with surveys left incomplete by July will have their orders cancelled and your pledge will be considered a donation.
With the spooky timing messages out of the way, onward to the fun stuff: production on your robot friends is in motion!! Bulk orders for both the pins and stickers were placed this past week to the tune of 3050 pins and 2605 stickers. That absolutely bananas total includes everything ordered by you amazing folks, plus some generous extra across designs to make sure I have enough after pin grading, and then to bring to conventions and other events after initial fulfillment is complete!
For those curious about the behind the scenes of it all, here's a peek at how the formatting for the character art sticker sheets works:
Raise your hand if you're a trash goat at heart!
I spent a bunch of time this past week bumping elements around gently to ensure that all the text and mini versions of the pin art could also be viable kiss cut stickers. It was important to me that you could slap "KNOWN BUGS: HOARDER" onto something if you so desired (I know I will, because this is an accurate description of me as an entity). The red line closest to the outside is the bleed border, and the rest indicate the boundaries of the stickers themselves!
The OG Buddy who will absolutely come to life in other mediums in the future.
The red is not printed on, just a cut guideline to communicate with my excellent sticker manufacturer.
Of the elemental designs, Incubate was decidedly one of the most popular!
For the selective holographic stickers, my time was mostly spent being picky about cleaning up all the little edges. The pin versions have the reality of being made of metal and enamel paint to make them look badass with just the vectored lines. The sticker versions have added raster gradients, airbrushing, and lil hand-adjusted drop shadows to give the metal and backing board the impression of depth. They also have a mask layer that indicates which portion should remain rainbow shiny vs the areas that receive opaque white ink printing.
And now for some statistics, because it's really dang interesting to see. The two items with the highest counts were of course the cross collaboration freebie, Branch, and first 48 hour freebie, Pause. Pause was also a popular add on, resulting in a total of 285 pin orders (209 were freebies to qualifying backers, so 76 additional) and 46 sticker orders. I ultimately ordered 400 Pause pins and 150 Pause stickers.
Outside of the freebies, the top three ordered pin designs were Byte (127), Malware (117), and Circat (97). The underdog pin designs with the least orders were Torrent (28) followed by Jump, Firewall, and DDoS, all tied at 37. (Leaf and Incubate were quite popular elemental designs comparatively, at 84 and 72 pin orders respectively.) The top ordered stickers were all selective holographic, RAID (51), followed by Byte and Circat tied at 48. The least ordered stickers were the Hex sticker sheet (19) and Torrent sticker sheet (20), followed by the Torrent selective holographic (21). It can be hard to predict what's going to be popular! Torrent happens to be one of my personal favorites, and I don't really mind - it's important to make the art you want to see anyway, and sometimes what doesn't perform online mysteriously does sell at in-person events. <3
I see swans almost everyday here and I love them dearly.
Of folks who have completed the shipping address on their surveys, 237 backers and pre-order customers are from the United States. 39 are from various countries in the European Union, 25 are from the United Kingdom, 13 from Canada, 6 from Australia, and 1 from Hong Kong. Extremely cool! As an artist living and working in the Netherlands, I'd love to figure out how to reach a broader EU audience, but since my first 34 years of life were spent in the US it makes perfect sense that the majority of my audience is still there. I'm grateful to all of you for making this project a reality!!
Are there any other stats you would be interested in seeing? If so, let me know in the comments! I hope you're all having a wonderful week. ✨
