How Many Myachis are in a Series?

by Crazy Ivan

There were a few obstacles when we decided to do the whole 5.1x series.  For those who aren't up to the minute on their recent Myachi series, we just released the most ambitious series of all time.  Instead of a typical 12 sack series, we actually co-released 24 sacks; 12 in the 5.1 series (packaged singly) and 12 in the 5.1x series (packaged in twos with a DVD).

Now, we've done co-releases before.  We released the 2.1 and 2.2 at the same time and did the same thing with the 3.0 and 3.1 series.  The difference is that these series only had 6 sacks in them, so in total we were only releasing 12 sacks.  This has been standard since the 3.2 series so it doesn't seem like a big deal now, but at the time it was a pretty big deal.

To those that learned Myachi in the last few years, 12 sacks in a series seems pretty standard.  But truth be told, it took a long time to settle on that size.

It's hard to talk about series before 1.0 because there was a lot of intermixing, re-releasing and "in-between" sacks that weren't actually manufactured with a full series.  Today one series abruptly ends and another begins.  Tag numbers and numbers on the packaging essentially set the series in stone.  But neither of those things existed in the earlier series.  There wasn't a clear division between each series and sometimes one or two of the sacks being offered at any given time might just be the slower sellers from the previous "series".

Series 1.0 was the first to be offered in a numbered package and that changed everything.  The vast majority of the sacks before that came in no packaging at all, though a small run of early blister cards were made and several locations offered Myachis in collector's tubes.

Series 1.0 had 9 different colors.  The size of the packaging that we chose made the logical number of units per pack 36, so we needed a number that was divisible by that.  9 meant that there would be 4 of each different pattern in each pack and that worked so well that we did it again for the 1.1 series.

But on 1.2 we went kind of crazy and offered seven different sacks.  This made the shipping odd-ball and it was a short lived experiment.

For a while after that we settled into a 6-sack series.  Once again, the number was divisible by 36 and that satisfied us through the 2.0, 2.1, 2.2, XM7, 3.0, 3.1 and 5B, but there was a problem.  No matter how cool the fabrics, colors and patterns you choose for a series, some will invariably be cooler than others.  The fact that a Hard Core Cammo was awesome didn't make the Aztec Red any less cool, but it never sold as quickly as the Hard Core Cammo.

This means that after you put a series on the shelf in a store, some of the colors will sell out quicker than the others and leave less and less variety.  You'll put new series on the shelf, of course, but the coolest colors will still sell out faster and everything else will stack up further and further.

When there's only 6 sacks in a series, this can be a serious problem.  If 2 of those sacks are way more popular than the others (and two of them always are), you'll quickly be left with only 4 colors.  Of course, one of those colors will be the most popular so you'll wind up with only 3 colors and eventually 2.  When you have a whole shelf of the same two colors, it doesn't catch the eye the way a variety does.

By the time we actually made the switch to 12 it was a technicality.  Like I said, the 2.1/2.2 and 3.0/3.1 were released at the same time, making them essentially the same series.  By 3.2 we simply combined the release and made the number official.  12 sacks per series (and once again, divisible by 36).

That number has proven to be perfect for us.  Now, even once the four or five most popular sell out, you still have 7 different colors to choose from.  Series 4.0, 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 4.5, 5.0, 5.1 and 5.1x have all shown that the 12 color system works well.

But now we're throwing out a new wrinkle and co-releasing 24 different patterns.  It's been so popular that it's all but guaranteed that 5.2 will be accompanied by a 5.2x.  It adds a great deal of difficulty to the process of picking and naming the sacks, but it also adds the new wrinkle of figuring out which Myachis to pair together in the double packs.

It is, of course, a labor we're all happy to undertake.  It really doesn't matter how many new series I see, I always get excited when the new ones come out.