This Year in Myachi

by Crazy Ivan


So the whole New Year's celebration is in the rear view mirror.  I'm starting to get used to putting the "12" at the end of the date and they're almost done cleaning all the confetti up in Time Square.  That means it's time to start reflecting on all the things the previous year brought us and all the things that we hope to see in the 2012.

This has been a huge year for Myachi, obviously, and I thought it would be fun to revisit the year with a brief chronological list of some of the major changes and breakthroughs that have taken place in the last trip around the sun.

It should be said in advance that I'm probably going to leave out some pretty big stuff here.  Some stuff will be omitted because there just isn't room for everything, but some will quite simply be forgotten.  I invite you to help us continue the conversation on this, though.  If you think there's some Myachi moment that I should have mentioned, feel free to bring it up in the comments section below.

Also note that I'm trying (by faulty human memory) to keep these in order of when they happened, so while this will serve as a "top 10" Myachi events of the year, it's not listed by least important to most important, but rather in the order that they happened (as near as I can recall).

 1) Myachi Starts a Blog 

It's entirely possible that to most of the Myachi world, this is a pretty minor thing, but I think it's safe to say that it was at least worth a mention to anybody who happens to be reading this.  The Myachi Blog is about to celebrate it's first anniversary next month (it was introduced to the world at halftime of last years Super Bowl), and while it has been slow of late, I'd say we've built up a pretty solid archive of material in the past almost year.

 2) Myachi Goes to Australia 

It's always a big deal when Myachi goes to a new country and that has happened several times this year.  New markets are opening up for us all the time, but most of the time we don't have any personal interaction with the new market.  We just send Myachis and video chat with the people promoting the game.  We're huge in Chile, but no Myachi Master has ever visited the nation to teach people the game.

Australia was different.  3 of the best Myachi Masters in the world visited the continent over 2011; Kid Myach started things off and Animal and Maverick followed up for an extended tour.  Nice to know that whatever hemisphere you're in, Myachi's been there.

 3) Myachi Releases It's Second Commercial 

To be perfectly honest, this is nowhere near as big a story as we were hoping it would be when it happened.  We had a blast filming it and it came out really well, but alas it failed to have the earth-shattering impact it was supposed to and the production company was unable to continue to run it after it's test market.  That being said, it was still a huge boon to Myachi and for the short period that the ad was running we got in front of a lot of eyeballs.

 4) $5 Blister Card Introduced 

When the company first started, Myachi Man sold them for $5.  There was no packaging to speak of, there were just Myachis with little instruction booklets attached to them and they sat in boxes next to cash registers with a sign next to them that said "$5".  When we introduced the freestanding blister packaging with the finger knugz, we had to up the retail price to $7 to make it work.  But we always wanted to get the price back down to the place where we felt like it belonged.

Some manufacturing wizardry and Myachi Man's tireless effort finally made that happen this year with the introduction of the new $5 Blister Pack.  This is a very unusual move for a company... going back to the lower price it had a decade earlier.  This would be like the gas stations suddenly going back to charging $1.19 a gallon.  But we made it happen and it's been a huge boost for the company.  The better value for the customer has meant a lot more people buying so even charging less, we made more money.  I wish that all companies would follow our lead here...

 5) $10 Double Pack Introduced 

It happened shortly after the $5 single was unleashed on the Myachi buying public, but offering two Myachis and a DVD might well have been the single biggest thing that happened to us over the year from a purely financial perspective.  In every location where we offer both packs, the double outsells the single.  No surprise there, as customers recognize a great value when they see it.  The series was called 5.1X because it was an experimental series, but I think it's safe to say that the experiment was a success.

 6) Myachi Returns to Dollywood 

Okay, so I'm not keeping to my chronology here, as the $10 Double was introduced while we were at Dollywood, but I still thought it was worth a mention.  It probably isn't, but my personal connection to the amusement park (it was my first assignment with Myachi) and all the excitement and nostalgia of going back has been echoing throughout the year so I felt like it would be a mistake to leave it out.

 7) Metal and Lucky Join the Team 

Again, this isn't something I can neatly fit into the chronology because Metal joined the team earlier in the year and Lucky came later in the summer, but the addition of their energy to the Myachi team is definitely one of the most important things that has happened to us over this or any other year.  Lucky's flamboyant style and dedication mix with Metal's broad skills and self-deprecating sense of humor have definitely added a distinct spice to the team and made the biweekly meetings a lot more entertaining.

 8) Myachi Ramps Up It's School Program 

This is something you'll be hearing more and more about over the next year, but thanks to the indefatigable efforts of Monk and Kid Myach, we've been doing a lot more school outreach over this past year than we ever have before.  In fact, in the past 3 months, we've done more school shows than we had in the entire history of Myachi up to that point.  That's more school shows in 3 months than we managed in 13 years!

Thanks to the state of New York recognizing what an awesome program we have to offer and helping us get it into ever more schools, we should be able to quadruple the number of school shows we do this year at least.  It's one of the most effective (and most fun) ways to promote the game that we've ever found so we're all pretty fired up about this turn of events.

 9) Animal's Departure 

You didn't think this was all going to be good news, did you?

So if this is the first you're hearing about it, you can blame me.  I started writing a long blog entry about it when it happened, but I got so sentimental about the whole thing that I couldn't finish it.  While Animal is still a part of the Myachi movement and always will be, he is no longer a part of the Myachi Company.  He left us after a long period of reflection and he left us for the only reason that would have made any sense; he fell in love.

Animal had been dating this gal for a several months and we all saw that something was different about him.  He had dated a number of women sense he moved to NYC, but he was clearly serious about this one.  I think we'd all figured out that he was in love before he did.

A few months ago she moved to Jersey to take a new job and Animal couldn't stand only seeing her a couple of times a week (when he could go to Jersey or she could come to the city), so he moved there.  We were all really sad to see him go, but we understood given the circumstances.  Hopefully he will continue to play a large role in the movement going forward, but it's still way too quiet at the House of Skills.

 10) Paddles Are Introduced 

This happened late in the year and I really haven't had the chance yet to treat this with the detail it needs to be treated on the blog, so look for a longer Paddle Review entry coming in the near future.  But for the purposes of this countdown, let me just say that the Paddles hit stores in late November and sold out in early December.  We still have a few stores here and there with a couple of Paddle sets and there are still a couple at HQ, but most of our retailers sold out within a few days.  For weeks now our phones have been ringing off the hook with store owners trying to reorder.  In one of our locations we were selling upwards of a hundred paddle sets a day.

All these things combined spell out a spectacular year on the horizon.  With some new energy, better prices, new products and one more year of experience for every Myachi Master in the company, I'll go out on a limb and say that in 2012 we're going to smash every sales record we've ever set.

Okay, so maybe that isn't all that "out on a limb".  After all, we smashed every previous record this year and those were the records we'd set the year before when we smashed all the records prior to that.  We've been growing for a long time... but now I think it's about time for us to explode.