Choosing the New Series

by Crazy Ivan


Right now at the House of Skills, the dining room table has been taken over. There will be no dining on it for at least a couple more days.

That's not really a huge problem for us.  Pinky and I usually eat downstairs in our apartment (also known as the basement) and Monk and Mav usually just order some sushi or chinese or pizza or whatever and eat in the living room.  Kid, Lucky and Bones are rarely here at dinner time so I can't really comment on their dining habits except to say that they don't involve the dining room table at the House of Skills.

That's not to say that the table doesn't get used.  It's often used for important stuff like playing Myachi Ping Pong, holding up our skill toy collection for photos, card games, hurtling... it's generally a pretty busy table.  Even now, it's serving a pretty important function, just not one that involves food.  Right now, every inch of the table's surface is covered in fabric swatches of hundreds of different colors and patterns.

This is all part of the now very familiar procedure for choosing the upcoming series.  This is the first real step, in which we select the fabrics that we'll be using.  Our manufacturer in China sends us all these swatches of available fabric and we have to whittle it down from some seven or eight hundred to the number that will actually be in the series.  Right now we're looking for 24 colors for both the 12 single pack series and the 6 double pack series that will accompany it.

As I've learned over the years, there's a lot more to it than simply picking out the fabrics that you think are the coolest looking.  That's certainly how I tackled it the first time I was involved in the process, but after seeing a number of series come and go I've come to realize many of the important nuances of choosing a good series.

 Step One: Eliminate the No-Gos 

This is actually pretty straight forward.  Not every swatch the manufacturer sends us is actually a good candidate for a Myachi.  So the first thing to do is to go through every swatch and set aside the ones that aren't going to be any good to us.  There are generally 3 things that can cause a swatch to get rejected this early on:

1. Bad Fabric - Obviously, not every fabric is right for a Myachi.  If a fabric is too stiff, too slippery or too tough, we can't use it at all, even if it looks really cool.  Now granted, we've made some Myachis in the past that turned out to be too slippery, stiff or tough so I'm willing to admit that this isn't an exact science, but there are a number of fabrics that can be eliminated right away.
2. Bad Design/Color - Sometimes you see a fabric and you have to wonder what in the world it would be useful for.  Some of the swatches are the most hideous of colors and color combinations and still others are covered with repugnant imagery.  I can't say exactly what makes a design or color bad, but when I'm looking at a periwinkle fabric with pictures of strawberries and puppies on it, I can feel pretty confident setting it aside.
3. Big Pattern - Myachis are pretty small and most of these fabrics were designed with articles of clothing and upholstered pieces of furniture in mind, so often times the pattern is awesome, but it's too big.  It's such a pain when it happens but sometimes you find the most awesome fabric pattern, but the pattern itself is so big that on a Myachi you would only see a small portion of it and wouldn't be able to see what you were looking at.

So once these ones are set aside, it's time to move on to the next step.

 Step Two: Get Everyone's Opinion 

Myachi isn't a one man (or one woman) show.  Back in the earliest days of the movement, Myachi Man was making all these decisions on his own and had only his own tastes and experience to draw from.  That's why many of the earliest series might have seemed repetitive.  But these days we have a big team of qualified Myachi Masters and all of us have a lot of experience watching people pick out there Myachis.  So not only do we bring in all of our own opinions and tastes, but those of us who've been at this for a while also bring some knowledge of what kind of colors and patterns sell.

This is the part of the process that we're in now, and that's why the table is covered over in swatches.  We're getting the opinions of everybody (even the members of the team that don't live here, which is why the table is taken up for several days) and developing a slow consensus.

Now, there's never a 100% consensus.  There will always be one that somebody really likes and nobody else likes.  There will always be one fabric that we're split on.  Maverick and I often have to take the role of the cynic when some of the newer masters are opining on their preferences by pointing out similar looking fabrics that produced duds.  But in the end, we'll probably all agree about the majority of what goes in the series and the rest will be a compromise ultimately brokered by the Myachi Man.

 Step Three: Balance the Series 

This is a step that we only learned the importance of relatively recently.  As the series got bigger and bigger, it became more and more important to look at the whole series together, rather than focusing on the individual sacks.  If you've ever looked at a series and said "There isn't enough variety in fabric types" (series 5.2) or "There aren't enough bright colors" (series 3.2) or "There aren't enough dark colors" (series 2.1), that's because the series wasn't properly balanced.

Once we have everyone's opinions there are usually a lot of sacks that we can say are definitely in.  We ask everyone to choose their ideal series independently and once we do, we look over all of them for overlap.  There are usually a few fabrics that everyone had on their list.  Something like the Harcore Cammo or the Red Dragon is just a no-brainer and as soon as we see the fabric we know it's gonna be part of the next series.

So we start with all those fabrics.  Let's say that provides us with 8 of the 24.  Then we look at what we've got and ask ourselves if it's heavy on dark or bright, if it's heavy on a specific fabric type, if it's heavy on a particular color.  Then we start filling in the rest of the series with the most popular selections from everyone's choices.  As we do, we continue to evaluate the whole series.  Do we have enough reds?  Enough blues?  Too many blacks?  Any greens?  Is this series going to look dark on the shelves?

This is actually an extremely involved process all by itself.  Not only do we have to make sure that the series is balanced, but we have to try to ensure that it will remain balanced even after the most popular sacks sell out.  To get there, we not only have to figure out which will be the best sellers, but also which will be the least popular sellers that will dominate the shelves as the series draws to a close.

 Step Four: Find the Alternates 

It's a sad fact, but sometimes the fabrics we like the most won't be available once it comes time to pull the trigger on the series.  The whole process, including shipping all these swatches from China, takes several weeks and oftentimes the swatches that were available when they were sent out are sold out by the time we get done with all of our fiddling and mixing.

Now, we could just choose 5 or 6 fabrics and call them the "alternates".  We could pick or favorite ones that didn't actually make the cut and plug them in for any fabrics that weren't available.  We could do this and we actually have done it in the past.  But we've learned our lesson about it.

The problem with that method is that it messes up the intricate balance that we try to achieve.  What if two of the fabrics that weren't available were red but the top two alternates were black?  That could lead to a series that has very little red, too much black and is overall just way too dark.  What if the fabric that was unavailable was a pink and the top alternate was an green fabric with spiders on it (which would be awesome!)?  That might result in a series that doesn't have enough sacks that appeal to the gals and that might actually cost us sales.

So the alternative, which is way more involved but gets us a way better result, is to choose an alternate (or two) for every fabric that we select in the series.  We look at the fabric and then try to find something similar (ie same basic color, same fabric) as an alternate.  That way even if 8 or 9 of the fabrics we want are unavailable, we can still end with a balanced series.

 Step Five: Come up With the Names 

At this point we lock in our choices and we do a prototype run.  We get sample Myachis with all the fabrics we've selected flown in while the factory tackles the bulk of the order.  This gives us a week or so to jam with them before we settle on the names that will appear on the packaging.

This is actually such a long and drawn out process that it really deserves it's own blog entry, so for now we'll leave it there and once we reach that point in this new series, you can expect a follow up article.