Ep11: How TCG Accessories are Made with Realm Guard

Join Josh on The Business of Gaming podcast as he visits with Geoff from Metro Seattle Gamers in Seattle, Washington. This episode discusses the process of different structures for running a gaming club, what best practices are for getting commercial real estate for the club and what challenges come with growth.

Auto Generated Transcript:

SPEAKER_01: 0:00

Hey, y'all. Welcome to the Business of Gaming podcast. I'm Josh with Game Haven Guild, and today I'm with Cameron from Realm Guard. Tell us about your business and what got you into the gaming industry.

SPEAKER_00: 0:09

So we make accessories for trading card games, mostly Magic, but we're starting to step into Larkana and some other ones. We're players ourselves. That's why our motto is for players by players. That's what got us into this industry. We were looking for basically sleeves that had like deck themes, the cards that we played with, and no one made them. It was 2023 at the time, I think. And I'm like, how could that be? It's 2023 and no one makes sleeves for like actual deck themes. And so I just started making them and it kind of snowballed from there.

SPEAKER_01: 0:42

When you're thinking about the products where sleeves were the first thing, you really focused on that. How did you go about

SPEAKER_00: 0:48

just figuring out how to get sleeves made? I've always been really good at just researching stuff online. Anything I need to learn, you know, YouTube is a great resource. Just Google it and you'll find your answer.

SPEAKER_01: 0:58

Thinking about the products assortment and how it grows from there. You started with sleeves. Is it just natural to start doing boxes or how do you kind of think about the assortment?

SPEAKER_00: 1:07

Yeah, so we started with sleeves. They started doing amazing and then people were like, well, we want deck boxes to match our sleeves. So we started making those and then we started doing clay mats. It just keeps growing and snowballing. The actual

SPEAKER_01: 1:20

art on it, one of the big things about your business is you've got very cool customized art with it. Are you doing any testing before you go to print of these pieces or how do you decide what what's good art and I'm going to print it or what's not.

SPEAKER_00: 1:32

Yeah, so that's one of the kind of risks that you take with a business like this. Everything, every design that you make has a minimum order quantity. So if you're getting manufactured somewhere else, you have a minimum, you know, I say it's 600 packs. So you just kind of got to, you know, I hope this sells well. And if it doesn't, then you just wasted, you know, 600 packs worth of sleeves. Yeah, that's one of the challenges that we face in this industry. But we mainly see that probably 90% of our designs do well. So your company's startup

SPEAKER_01: 1:59

with a different name. It's called AI Armor. You're changing it to Realm Guard. Can you talk us through that process of why that was the starting name and then why you're changing the names? Yeah,

SPEAKER_00: 2:07

absolutely. So when we first started, as most businesses, we had absolutely no money. And it's very expensive to pay artists. Each design that we pay now is over$1,000. And we started with 16 designs. That's 16 grand right there just to start. AI is a really good tool if you use it correctly, which I think we have this whole time. We get a design from AI and then we have artists Well, that's a, it's a very

SPEAKER_01: 2:32

responsible way to do it of get your ideas from the AI, but then have an artist actually create the true render.

SPEAKER_00: 2:37

And so I wasn't like super big into this industry before I started. And I didn't know the stigma behind it. I didn't, you know, I thought it was a cool tool. Oh, AI is going to be the future. Let's go ahead and just name, you know, change our name to that or start with that name. Um, and then probably a year or two after we noticed, you know, people don't really like this. So we started just, you know, doing nothing but artists and now we're starting and change our name. I tell people this all the time and you can see it through our actions. We are really our company for the community. If the community doesn't like something, we're going to try our best to change it. And if we want to continue to grow and get into more stores, then we figured it's best to take it out of the name and just continue with Realm Garden. So 2023, you start. Where do you start selling? We started straight on Amazon. Yeah, I think we started with 16 designs. I put those 16 designs on Amazon. They sold. I put it right back in the business. and it's just kept growing up from there. But yeah, we started on Amazon. And how's that changed between now and then? Where are all the different areas you're selling now? So it's mainly still Amazon, but we do sell on our own website and then we're in about 80 stores across the country so far. Micro Center actually reached out to us yesterday wanting to look at getting our product into their stores. So yeah, we're just continuing to grow. In terms of

SPEAKER_01: 3:52

that step on distribution, because Amazon, you were probably starting to fulfill yourself or did you go through a distributor where you went through?

SPEAKER_00: 3:58

Yeah, straight FBA. So fulfillment by Amazon. We send it to them and they sell it. And then how's distribution work for you today? Amazon still through that? Yeah. So our Amazon, they still do it, but everything for stores and our website, we do ourselves. We have a shop now. Would

SPEAKER_01: 4:11

you consider this convention more of like a marketing piece or is this a sales activity for you?

SPEAKER_00: 4:16

No, it's definitely marketing. I never go to conventions with the intention to make a profit. I really don't care. It's just advertising. Get our name out there. This one at PAX, we have, you know, we've done really well. We've almost sold out everything that we bought so far.

SPEAKER_01: 4:28

So let's talk about advertising in general then what has worked well for you and kind of building your brand over

SPEAKER_00: 4:34

the

SPEAKER_01: 4:34

last three years

SPEAKER_00: 4:35

we've actually done just close to about zero in advertising the only thing we do is post on social and everything is just kind of organic people just word of mouth I mean players really do love our stuff and that's why we've done so well we're players you know we kind of know what other players like so that's I think that's why we've done so well but yeah barely any advertising

SPEAKER_01: 4:55

is there anything you've done that you would

SPEAKER_00: 4:57

highly recommend people don't do or what hasn't worked well I would say if you're going to go do conventions like this, just, you know, just have it in mind that you might not make a product, but it takes, you know, a little tiny word and then it starts spreading. I mean, that's really why you come here. With the business days, are you where you expected to be or is there anything different that's happened? Absolutely not. So when I started a little over three years ago, I had a full-time traveling job and I just kind of started to do this, you know, I just side hustle. I'll make, you know, a few extra bucks. I throw this on Amazon and sell it. And then I got a laid off, which is, you know, the story of a lot of people. So I got laid off. I just, you know. full into this, and it's just absolutely blown up, and I didn't expect that at all. Yeah, it's been wild. In

SPEAKER_01: 5:44

terms of becoming a part of the industry, have you run into any challenges in working with either folks on products and or challenges with competition or competitors that you maybe

SPEAKER_00: 5:57

weren't prepared for or expected? We're starting to see now that we're getting bigger that people are starting to copy our designs on Amazon and stuff like that, but I think there's enough space for everyone. So we don't worry about them. We just focus on, you know, our product and just making it the best that we can.

SPEAKER_01: 6:11

Now, looking at the next couple of years, right? Your booth today has new sleeves. It's got decks. It's got play mats. Where do you go from here? Do you just continue to expand the designs within that? Or are you looking at adding more products to the mix? I think

SPEAKER_00: 6:25

we'll add more products. We have a battery bank deck box. We're doing double deck boxes or popping them out with a backpack. We've got like a briefcase coming out for our deck boxes. So, yeah, we're expanding the the designs and the product itself. And then we're also going to step into other TCGs. How do you feel about print to order as maybe a business model? Print to order is amazing if you can sustain it. I don't know how other companies do it, but for us, every single design that we make requires a printing plate, which is$500. So we can't really do custom unless you want to pay$515 for a pack of sleeves. So what challenges do you see coming up in the next three years? For us, it's just scaling and growing. I mean, that's always the hardest of any company. Every single thing that, most every single thing that we make, we put right back into the business. You know, more designs, more product. Right now, it's hard for us to even keep product in stock just because it, you know, it sells almost instantly. It's good when you have a good quality product. It's a good problem to have, yeah, but it makes it hard to grow.

SPEAKER_01: 7:24

Well, tell me about your thoughts on others getting into the industry. Not specifically necessarily making, you know, art sleeves or things, but others who want to start a business in the gaming industry. What advice would you you have for them?

SPEAKER_00: 7:36

Probably the same advice I hear everyone say. You just got to start. It's as simple as that. When I started, I had a few thousand bucks. If you have that much to spare, just start and see what happens because just like us, you have no idea where it's going to go unless you actually just start and do it.