Myachi International

by Crazy Ivan

As many of you know, Kid Myach just got back from Australia.  His trip was so successful that we're going to be sending Animal and Mav back down under to rock out a big show out there next month so you can expect to see the continent blow up with Myachidom from Busselton to Brisbane by May.

But this was not our first international excursion in Myachi's long history.  Just last year Myachi Man flew to Paris to meet with a big distributor that wants to ramp up the movement in Europe.  We're already huge in Chile and moving East across South America.  A while back our boy Halestorm got the movement rocking in Beijing.  We've got some long term maniacs in England, Denmark and the Netherlands.  We even ran a commercial in Hungary many moons ago:



Obviously we want Myachi to stretch across the globe and fester in every continent that contains people (Antarctica gets a free pass).  We've been working on our international connections for years and slowly building relationships so that when it was time to flip the switch, we'd know where it was.

Well I think we're pretty much there.  I was talking with Myachi Man last night but our conversation got cut short when he got a call from one of our guys in China.  Important call so I hopped off the line with the promise that Myachi Man would call me back when he got off the line.  Unfortunately, by the time he got off the phone with China it was time for a Skype meeting he had set up with some cats in Australia.

Our tendrils are reaching all over the world and it's happening pretty quickly.  Many of you already know how big Myachi is in Chile.  They have their own website, they're big on Facebook and they've been on Chilean TV several times:

(The good Myachi stuff starts about 0:42)

There are, of course, a lot of crazy consequences that come with becoming an international brand.  One is what Myachi Man was discovering last night at about 10pm, and that's the crazy time zone stuff.  Since we're dealing with distributors and customers in 5 continents, Myachi Man has to keep a pretty crazy schedule.  He's the only person I know that has meetings scheduled for one in the morning.

Another is, of course, the language barrier.  Now, that doesn't become too much of a problem when you're dealing with folks from Australia (although I still don't know exactly what "Good on ya" means).  In fact, English is kind of an international business language thanks to the Internet so most of all of the people we deal with share a common language.  It also helps that we have Myachi Masters that speak French, Spanish, German and Russian.

But we're not just dealing with business people, we're also dealing with all the potential Myachi Maniacs in these various countries and not all of them speak English.  What this means is that from time to time we have to do stuff like this:

Te darás cuenta de que todo está escrito en español.

The blister pack you see above is available only in Chile (which makes it about priceless to collectors in America) and you'll notice that everything except the names of the Myachis and the names of the cartoon characters has been translated to Spanish.  I kind of wish they'd gone ahead and translated our names as well because being "Loco Ivan" is almost as cool as having a reason to call Steve the "Myachi Hombre".

This was not the first time we'd ever translated our packaging for a customer.  We'd done the same thing many years ago for some of our German customers as well.  They weren't getting whole Blister Packs redesigned or anything.  Instead, we needed only to translate the little booklet that is attached to the Myachi.

Ultimately we used that booklet on three different Myachis distributed in Germany: The Auva, the Drei and the Sparks7.  Like the Spanish language blister, these Myachis are collectors gold if they still have the instruction booklet attached.

Pictured above: Collector's Gold.

But even that wasn't our first foray into the international market.  As early as 2002 we got word of a "Myachi and Darts" club in Madagascar of all places.  Despite this, we actually still don't have any retail locations in the entire continent of Africa and thus far none in Asia either.

What this means, of  course, is that we've still got a long way to go.  Of all the countries we have yet to break into, I think I'm looking forward to Japan the most.  It just seems like it's about time for an American toy to take over in Japan for a change.