How We Pick the Colors

by Crazy Ivan

We constantly get suggestions on designs of Myachis we should do in a future series.  Heck, it's so common that we're running a contest based on it.

But a lot of people have been asking me if we'll be able to make the designs that people are suggesting.  Unfortunately at the moment the answer is no but hopefully we'll be able to change that in the future.  When I try to explain why, it kind of confuses people so I figured I'd throw down a blog entry about how we actually choose the series.

Now keep in mind that this is only the case for series sacks.  Customs (protos, promos, special event sacks, etc.) can be made with whatever color, design and wording that the customer wants, but they're much more expensive to produce than our run of the mill series sacks.

So the first thing that happens is that we select the fabric.  Series sacks are made in China so we can't choose fabrics that are in the US.  Instead we have our manufacturer send us a ton of swatches of fabric that they have available to them.

They look like this, except there are thousands of them.

Now most of the fabrics that we get are essentially useless.  There are a lot of things we have to looks at before we can consider a fabric to have real Myachi potential.  For example:

• If the fabric is too thin it won't stand up to the abuse of kicking and jamming.
• If the fabric doesn't have a backing the secret sauce will leak out.
• The fabric can't be too smooth or too stiff or it would make a terrible jammer.
• If there's a pattern the pattern has to be too small or you wouldn't know what it is.  Check the goofy airplane swatch above.  If we cut that into a Myachi all you would see is half a wing and a bunch of blue so it would look awful.

There's more to it, of course, but those are the first questions we ask.  Once we narrow it down to only useful fabrics with real Myachi potential we'll start looking at the various colors the fabric comes in.  Most fabrics will come in several different colors so we can choose sister sacks from some of them:

Couple of familiar faces there...

Of course, we're still left to guess how good a jammer each sack will be so we have them send over prototypes of each of the fabrics we select.

Choosing a series involves a lot of work.  We usually all glance through the potential swatches together and each pick our top 12 or 15.  Then we go through everyone's picks.  Some of the fabrics will be on everyone's list and others will be all over the map.  Anything everyone likes gets into the series and then we argue over discuss which ones to use to fill in the blanks.

One of the big concerns is good color variety.  We know from experience that some colors always sell better than others so you don't want to put more than 1 pink or purple Myachi in a series but you're cool putting 2 or 3 blue or red sacks in there.  You want a couple of plain colors but the rest have to have designs.  The colors have to all look good together.  You can't have too many "girly" colors but you also can't have too few.

The actual process of choosing a series takes quite a bit of time and effort and once we settle on our selections we'll call the factory and usually find out that a few of our favorites are unavailable so we'll have to go back to the bargaining table and start afresh.

Of course, that's nothing compared to the epic debates that happen when we get around to name them...