Wooden Update: Merch and More!

Hi Patrons,  

It’s been a while since we've updated you on what's going on (besides the comics), so here's what we've been up to in the last 12+ months in terms of merchandise, a new office and a big increase in Patrons.

Office

On April 1st we had to move offices since the place we were renting asked for a 70% increase which was quite ridiculous since they wouldn't be offering more service or anything else to compensate the price increase. We've been part of the Dutch Game Garden company cluster since 2013 and we quite like it, so we decided to move with the rest to a new building and rent an office there instead of paying 70% more. It was a bit of a hassle moving with the current pandemic but a moving company helped out a lot. We will post some pictures in the upcoming weeks of the new Wooden Office but we still need to buy some cabinets and furniture to completely settle in so expect pictures soon™.

New Patrons

We want to thank all our Patreon supporters and everyone that started supporting us in the past year. Patrons/revenue more than doubled in a year! Let's keep up this momentum and continue to grow together. Next month we'll have been on Patreon for four years, but the last 12 months have definitely been the most fun since we started. We had a lot more engagement on posts and the Discord is growing and getting more active by the week! We are always up for improvement and whenever you have feedback or suggestions on how to improve our Patreon or our communication, please let us know! 

Merchandise

Now for the big update about merchandise! For the last 12+ months we have been working on starting a merchandise line of premium shirts, but we noticed this was not as easy as we thought. We did not want to do all the order handling/shipping ourselves since we had no clue how big this could become and we want to focus on creating content, so we searched for a partner to handle all this stuff. Comparing all the different platforms out there, we noticed very few potential partners offered shirts from organic or recycled materials, which was a must for us. We finally found a company that did offer some organic t-shirts but taxes proved to be a different problem. Since we are situated in the Netherlands and we would be doing business via a partner in pretty much every possible country in the world, we had to abide by all these different tax related rules and the administrative work needed for this was pretty much impossible for us to handle.

So we kept searching, and we finally found a Netherlands-based company that ticked all the boxes, which meant that the tax-stuff would be way simpler, so we got in touch with them. We're happy to say that this partnership worked out great and that this week, we've received samples of the shirts that will be available and they look and feel great!

We want to start small, since this process is new to us and we have a lot to learn, so we want to improve things along the way. We will start off by offering around six designs on unisex shirts (made from 100% organic cotton) starting this week. These will be designs inspired by (or appearing in) older comics, but they're fun designs nonetheless. The downside having a Dutch shipping partner is that the shipping cost to a couple of countries (including all the countries residing on the continents North and South America) are higher than we would like them to be. We are working with our partner to see if we can make shipping cheaper in the future, but since we just started and have no clue what our expected sales will be, we are currently not in a position to. A small positive note though: because the shipping is mostly a fixed fee, shipping three shirts instead of one keeps the shipping costs the same 😉. Besides shipping, we're also looking into the possibilities of tax exceptions when we ship to countries outside of the EU but we don’t have a solution for that at the moment since it involves a lot of changes for our partner that’s currently mostly EU focused.

I could go into a lot of more depth about what issues we ran into, or give more details about the merchandise and the STANLEY/STELLA brand, but this update is already quite long, I feel. Feel free to hit me up with a comment or contact me (Christiaan) on Discord and I’ll be happy to share more information!

So... where might I obtain that awesome Wooden Plank merchandise, you ask? The answer is: at https://store.woodenplankstudios.com/. Like mentioned before we will start off small, with six designs and only printing on unisex shirts. If you have ideas or suggestions about what type of clothing we should offer next, or ideas for designs, let us know! Our partner can create embroidered caps and we have also heard some people asking about hoodies, so we have a vague idea on what to create next, but let us hear what you want so we can look into it!

Discounts!

As a thank you to all our Patrons that have been supporting us for a while (some even going back to 2017 or 2016) we want to give back to you. We are offering all our Patrons a 20% discount coupon on merchandise! All the long-running Patrons that have backed more than $40 or would have backed over $40 in August with their current pledge we want to offer a 40% discount coupon on their first shirt. The coupons will be connected to the email address in your Patreon account and will be eligible for a maximum of two shirts.  Here's how to use the different coupons: All of these coupons are connected to your email address that you used to sign up for Patreon so please use that email address during checkout, or the coupons will not appear.

- Everyone below the $40 lifetime support threshold can use PATREON20 to get 20% off on up to 2 shirts.

- Everyone above the $40 lifetime support threshold can use PATREON40 to get 40% off on their first shirt. For these people, the PATREON020 coupon will not work!

- Everyone above the $40 lifetime support threshold that wants to buy a second shirt can use PATREON4020 on top of the other coupon to get an additional 20% off on their second shirt.  Whenever you have problems with your purchase you can always send us a message here on Patreon!

Closing

We are very sorry it took so long to get this merchandise store up and running. It felt really stupid to have continually have to tell you we still needed to do the reveal of the 2019 Hidden Details winner, but we needed the merchandise store for this reveal because, as you can guess, the person who found the most hidden details will win something from the store. Expect this post/reveal very soon! We'll recount all the hidden details found once more, to be sure.

But hey, it's finally up. You can expect regular updates to this store and once again, if you have any suggestions, let us know! Thanks for sticking with us for so long :)

Cheers,

Abel & Christiaan