It’s hard to believe that the SCL Shop has been around for nearly two full years. (We’ll celebrate the anniversary next month.)
But in that time a lot of things have changed. We’ve gone from shipping 100 orders per month to 500+ orders per month. We’ve gone from me running everything by myself to having 1.5 employees and occasional help from various members of the community.
In the early days I would unbox every single package I got on a live stream. If I tried to do that now, I would be streaming 40 hours a week and I wouldn’t have time to get anything else done.
As the SCL Shop continues to grow and evolve, the same has to happen with my activities in and around the business.
Auctions
For the foreseeable future, there will no longer be any Public Auctions.
The Public Auctions were initially created as a place to sell the items that didn’t meet the shop standards. Since that time I have found other ways to sell these items such as:
As the weeks and months went on, the Public Auctions became more and more difficult to produce and things started failing on the technical side which made it an unpleasant experience for everyone involved.
Pricing was the other main reason for holding the auctions in the beginning. I didn’t always know what to charge or have a good idea of how people valued various items.
While I’m still surprised occasionally, I do think I have a much better grasp on this topic now. I feel much more confident in my ability to price items. And I know that I may be leaving some money on the table by removing the competitive nature of the auctions, but I’m okay with that because I know I’m helping someone complete their collection and that is my main goal.
For the time being, the Private Auctions will continue to take place on the first Thursday of each month.
Live Streams
I have started shipping 99% of the product directly to SCL Jillian. The only reason I had been sending 1% to myself was for the occasional unboxing I did on the live streams. It’s hard to justify the continuation of this practice. It makes far more sense to send everything to Jillian so it can be shipped out immediately.
So if we remove the unboxings and we remove the auctions, it only makes sense to remove the Wednesday and Friday live streams.
Now I don’t want to remove the live streams completely, but I am going to “relocate” them.
To start off I’m going to host two 4-hour live streams per month on Saturdays. (Check the new schedule at the bottom of the newsletter for details on which Saturdays.)
These streams could contain anything, but the main thing it will allow me to do is get back to playing the games more regularly.
Previously I would only play the games during my rare Super Saturday streams. I’m excited to get the opportunity to play them more often.
But these live streams don’t have to be just about playing the games. I still want to interact with the community. I’ll be open to suggestions of games to play and characters to use. I’ll be open to SuperChargers Racing challenges. I’ll still show off cool, new items that I find or acquire. I’ll still be there to answer your questions and talk about all things Skylanders (and football and cheese).
Other YouTube Content
When I came back to the Skylands in 2021 I thought my focus was going to be on video content. I had tons of ideas and was thrilled by the idea of diving deeper into video content. That’s why I started the Figure Focus series.
But as you may know, just a few short months after my return I decided to experiment with opening up a shop and selling figures.
As I discussed earlier, that “side project” grew much more rapidly than I ever anticipated and quickly became the sole focus of SCL. In order to keep up with the demand I had to basically drop everything else I was doing and that included creating pre-recorded videos.
Now that I have a better handle on the shop (and a lot of help), this is my opportunity to return to video content.
I know there have been a lot of changes recently, so I appreciate you sticking with me. But I think that should be the bulk of it for a while and I’m hoping that it will be better for everyone in the end.