The Least Popular Myachi

by Crazy Ivan


One of the consequences of doing Myachis in series is that no matter how good we do in terms of color selection, no matter how tirelessly we toil over our choices, no matter how long we debate the potential fabrics and names, no matter what we do, one fabric will, by necessity, be the least popular.  Even if every sack in the series was awesome, one would be the most awesome and one would be the least awesome.

We often don't know which will be the least popular, but we find out pretty quickly in the stores.  Even a slight preference for other sacks becomes pretty obvious as you restock.  You start with an equal number of each Myachi.  Each series has 12 fabrics, each master carton contains 72 Myachis so in each box, you have 6 of each color.

So let's say we put 360 Myachis on the display and every time we sell 72 of them, we put up 72 more.  Well, we start with 30 of each color (6 in each box and 5 boxes on display), but when we sell the first 72, it's not going to be by selling 6 of each color.  One color will sell really well, so 20 of the 72 might all be that color.  Another will sell better than most and that one will account for 15 of the sales.  10 more will come from another popular color and six other colors will sell, let's say 4 each.  The other 3 colors are less popular, so let's say each of them only sold 1.

That's 72 Myachis sold, so we have to put up another box that contains 6 of each color.  That means that while there are only 16 of the most popular seller on the whole display (the 30 we started with minus the 20 we sold plus the 6 we restocked) while  there are 35 of the less popular colors still hanging out (the 30 we started with minus the 1 we sold plus the 6 we restocked).

It doesn't seem like much after the first restocking, but pretty soon a few less popular colors are going to start stacking up as the more popular colors sell out.  Again, this will happen no matter how good the series is.  Even in the 3.1 series (which seems to be the consensus "best series of all time"), this occurred.  The Blackbeards and Crimson Tigers sold out right away and the Wavy Oranges and Calvins started stacking up. The Calvins!  The single greatest series sack ever produced and it was the "dud" of the series.

I'm sorry I called you a dud...

Luckily, we have a solution to the problem.  Every few months we'll just retire the old colors and come up with a new series.  This way the less popular colors from the old series get mixed in with the new series and even if they continue to sell slowly, they aren't being replenished any more.  That means that pretty soon these sacks, which we call "carry overs" sell out completely just as the less popular colors from the previous series start stacking up.

Right now, in fact, we're replacing the 5.1 sacks with the 5.2s at some of our biggest retail locations.  The "Carry Over" sacks from series 5.1 were the Green Shredders, the Fishbone Orange and the Crimson Houndstooth.  Note that the consensus best jammer of the series (the Crimson Houndstooth) is probably the slowest seller of them all so you shouldn't mistake the slow seller for the worst Myachi.

The slowest seller in the 5.0 series was the Push Pop Orange and in some locations we're actually seeing double carry over.  The Push Pop Oranges that carried over into the 5.1s didn't sell out completely before the 5.2s came out so there are still two or three of them hanging out on the shelves.

And this leads to an obvious question.  What was the least popular Myachi of all time?  After all, if we see this phenomenon, we must have noticed one sack that beat out all the others, right?

Well it turns out that this is a much harder question to answer than you think for several reasons.  After doing the math, you might think that all you'd have to do is name the Myachi that carried over the longest, right?  The one that made it's way the furthest through successive series before selling out completely.  There is such a sack.  The Zoot Suit Blurple, which was last produced in the 3.2x series, was still lingering on shelves in major retail locations when we debuted the 4.4!

Shown here lingering.

But was the Zoot Suit Blurple really the least popular Myachi ever?  Well, if you look a bit closer, you'll notice that compared to the series before and after it, the 3.2x was an ENORMOUS series.  We made a ton of them.  So whichever was the least popular in this series was bound to carry over more than the carry overs in previous series.  It's not fair to single out the Zoot Suit among other "least popular" sacks just because it was the least popular sack in the largest series that was produced at that point?

Another strange contender could be the Purple Reign.  This incredibly cool and exquisitely jammable sack really started stacking up toward the end of the XM7 run and carried over for quite a while.  But that was an unusually narrow series, offering only 6 colors.  We'd done 6 color series before, sure, but when we did we'd released 2 of them simultaneously so there were really 12 choices on the shelf.  But with the XM7 there were only 6 choices and 4 of them were incredibly cool, even compared to a Purple Reign.  No surprise then, that this abnormally cool sack which would have been the 6th best seller in a series of 12 sacks, was the least popular in a series of 6.

This picture clearly doesn't belong in a discussion
of the least popular anythings ever.

So we can't really pin the "least popular" on that one either.  Perhaps we can find the answer by looking at it in another way.  Instead of looking at which sack carried over the longest, what if we look at which stacked up the most?  In other words, every sack starts off as 8.33% of the total (1 in 12), but as more popular ones sell out, they become a smaller % of the total and the less popular ones start filling in.  So in a series like the 3.2X, the extremely popular Finish Line might be only 2% of the Myachis on display, but a less popular sack like a Zoot Suit or a Delta Force Blue would account for, say 16% of the total.

If we look at all the past series and do some estimations, we would find that the Bazooka Joe was the least popular sack by that measure.  At the time of it's release (the simultaneous release of the 2.1 and 2.2 series), there were 12 sacks available and this plain-Jane pink sack eventually accounted for some 45% of the shelf space.  It was the slowest seller of the series, but it was also a slower seller than any other sack in any other series before it or since.

So we have our answer right?  The Bazooka Joe was the least popular, right?

Grab your pitchforks!

Not so fast.  There's one other interesting phenomenon to look at before we pass judgement.  And one interesting fact.  Let's start with the phenomenon.

In the 1.0 series, the Royal Tiger was the clear winner.  It sold out so fast that we could hardly put them up on the pegs before they were at the register.  It sold some 5 to 1 over the next best seller (the Black Butter).  So we brought it back in the 1.1 series, and guess what?  It was the least popular sack in the series and started stacking up.

But why?  Well, as it turns out, the other sacks available in a series make a huge difference when it comes to what's going to be popular.  The 1.0 series had a lot of plain colors.  Of the 9 sacks available, 6 were solid colors (the Dawg Diggity, the Purple Haze, the Red Stripe, the Black Butter, the Dawg Diggity and the Calvin).  Only 3 had patterns.  One was the Leopard Lime, which was a bright green, and the other was the Eye of the Dragon, which was gold and black and kind of weird.

The Royal Tiger was the king of this field because it simply stood out from the others.  It was brightly colored and had a cool pattern.  But when it was coupled with sacks like Punk Pink Leopard, the Flame Thrower and the Commando, it quickly became the least impressive patterned sack.  What's more, the sacks that were solid colors were in the minority so now they stood out.  To make matters worse, one of those solid colors was the Blue Crush, which is a strikingly sapphire blue color.  So the Royal Tiger wasn't even the only blue sack.

So what does this have to do with the Bazooka Joe?  Well, that leads us to the interesting fact.  Like I said, the Bazooka Joe was part of a 2 series co-release and it was a plain pink Myachi.  Contained in the series that it was co-released with (the 2.1), was the Bubbalicious, which was also a plain pink Myachi, except with a grippier fabric.  So when there were 2 plain pink Myachis to choose from, one of them was obviously going to stack up on the shelves (our bad!).

So where does all that leave us?  Can we really pin down the "least popular" Myachi of all time?  The truth lies, as it often does, in some gray area that is wide open to personal interpretation.  It might be the Zoot Suit Blurple, it might be the Purple Reign (although that's hard to imagine), it might be the Bazooka Joe and it might be something else entirely.  Perhaps the least popular Myachi is yet to come.

As we often do on this blog, we'll just have to leave this as an open question.  Maybe we'll revisit it again some time and when we do, I promise that there'll be less math.