Surviving Christmas

by Crazy Ivan


So it's happened once again; we made it through the Christmas season.

As you can easily imagine, the holiday season is a pretty taxing time of the year when you're in the toy business.  We do more than half of our retail sales in the final 6 weeks of the year so it's a time of the year that we both love and dread.  We love it because that huge chunk of sales is what keeps the lights on at the House of Skills all year, but we dread it because we know that it will be really hard work.

This year was a bit harder than most.  Our school outreach programs (the ones where we go and take over gym class for a few days) have been exploding in popularity and we continue to do a ton of private party work, so we had more demands on our staff than we usually do.  So we did what we always do; we hunkered down and crushed it.  There were a few really long weeks in there and a few really long days, but we all pushed a little harder and worked a little longer and before long, we made it out of the Christmas season alive.

And we sold a lot of Myachis.

We set a new sales record this year, which is something that we've done so many times in a row it seems routine at this point.  The Battle Paddles were such a huge hit that we sold almost every one we had in the country and are fast at work making more.  We crushed even our most ambitious projections and we made hundreds upon hundreds of new Myachi Maniacs (who will make thousands more themselves).

This week will be another huge one for us.  The week after Christmas is still huge here in NYC with all the tourists staying through for New Year's Eve.  Our major retail locations are still packed and we've got big things going on at HQ this week, so no rest for us just yet, but come January things will slow down, we'll all get a few weeks of vacation and we can finally put this year in the books.

Now, I don't need to tell any of our regular readers that all the extra hours over the holidays have kept me from fulfilling a few of my obligations.  This blog had cobwebs on it when I hopped on the other day.  The Trick of the Day video hasn't been updated in months.  The Facebook page has tumbleweeds blowing through it.  I have 6 trillion unread PMs on the forum.  I haven't checked our YouTube messages in weeks.  We haven't tweeted in so long that the coal miners are getting nervous (that joke was a real stretch, but someone out there will get it).  In other words, I've been online over the last few months about as often as I was in 1987.

But we made it through and the hardest part is in the rear-view mirror.  Obviously, I'm already starting to correct the problem.  I've still got a lot of work to do just to catch up, but the blog will be updated daily (or darn close to it) going forward and the Trick of the Day videos will make their triumphant return next week.  Perfect timing for a New Year's resolution or two...