Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University. This week, Thorne looks at some of the bestselling accessories in his store.
It’s Accessories Week here at ICv2, so I wanted to focus on some of the accessories we stock at my store. We are primarily a hobby game store, with about 80% of our sales deriving from board and other tabletop games, but looking at last month’s sales, about 25% of that comes from some sort of accessory, including:
Dice, especially blind bag dice sets, which I thought was a ridiculous idea when my staff first pitched them to me. I know gamers love dice and have ever since the hobby started, but for over 30 years, every gamer I knew wanted the option of selecting their own dice based on the color. Surely a random assortment of dice would never sell.
Boy, was I wrong. We started out with the Foam Brain Mystery Loot sets and, when they sold out in about a week, re-ordered them and gave the Halfling Loot bags a try. Surely, customers would want to see their microdice before they purchased them. Wrong again. We go through about a hundred packs of Mystery and Halfling Loot a month. That’s got to be it though, right? Customers will be happy with one brand of blind bag dice. No need to add another… wait, you say Black Oak Workshop has blind box dice sets? Called Dragon Hordes? With oversized dice and dragon pins? Well, maybe another line of blind box dice wouldn’t hurt. We started stoking them last summer, and while not as brisk a seller as the Mystery Loot sets, we still have restocked twice.
The line I really resisted, to the point that I did not bring in the first set, was Sirius Dice’s Acererak’s Treasure sets from Sirus Dice, to the point that I skipped the Crystal Edition. However, I saw the Gold Edition at the Alliance Open House and Sirius Dice offered an early release on them, so I gritted my teeth and bought two boxes, which sold through in less than a month. It appears people really like multiple ability coins and 42 different sets of dice of assorted rarity going up to 1 in 3,900. If I can find room for them, maybe FanRoll’s Misfit Dice?
Plush. We have stocked plush for decades, dating back to Toy Vault’s plush Cthulhu, but that, and the odd plushie from Steve Jackson Games, was about it. However, a couple of years ago, we saw a display of Squishables in Dave and Kell Wallace’s Fantasy Shop, found space, and brought them in. We found that the more mundane items such as apples, peaches and pizza sold very poorly, but the more esoteric figures such as the Plague Doctor and Nurse, Goth Christmas Tree, Nessie, Bigfoot and Mothman sell quite well. Mothman, especially, we cannot keep in stock. The major drawback is that they are rather pricy so, when we attended the Astra Show last summer, one item I wanted to find was a more affordable plush line. We found Palm Pals, which are much smaller than Squishables but only a third of the price, putting them well within young customers’ and parents’ and grandparents’ budgets.
Shashibo. We brought in Shashibo and Karmagami, from Fun In Motion Toys, based on a recommendation from Pat Fuge of Gnome Games, who sells out of them regularly. Both are fidget toys, allowing the user to flip the panels into multiple designs. Karmagami offers fewer designs than Shashibo does, but also retails for two-thirds less and sells far better for us than the Shashibo does.
There are plenty of other accessories out there, like sleeves, binders, miniatures, paints (we stock three lines and I know of stores that stock five). Stock up and sell them this holiday!
For more on the growing accessories market, see “ICv2 Accessories Week.”
Comments? What are some other good add-ons? Send them to castleperilousgames@gmail.com.
The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.
Source: ICv2
