We’ve already had to answer for this in other places, here’s the response for the benefit of people here:
We didn’t make many Moonshines and never planned on making more. We honestly made it entirely for ourselves, because Ben, Chris, and I wanted a responsive metal yoyo that fit in our pockets, and we figured we would sell just enough to justify it and the rest would trundle out eventually. Since the other two models in the initial Basecamp line were really “performance oriented” we wanted something that was just dumb fun. So I gave Chris the profile and he came up with the inner cup design and we all patted ourselves on the back and said “Ha ha it’ll never sell” and we made it anyway.
We were not expecting this strong of a response, at all. We’re more than a little surprised. We’re still not planning to run it again, but holy crap.
The reason for making it part of the bundle deal was that we did the same thing at Worlds, threw in a mug, and people LOVED IT. We had a ton of people buy full sets, and specifically thank us for making full sets available. The Moonshine did better than we expected on it’s own, and once we got back from Worlds and counted everything up we realized that we were almost out of them. We didn’t have enough to go around because we never thought the retailers would want them in the first place. So, we improvised.
We (CLYW) have been actively trying to make our line more “player friendly” lately with better pricing and plastic models, and we’ve gotten yelled at for it every step of the way. People take great pleasure in pointing out that we used to be exclusive and now we are not. So we thought “Hey, let’s throw the collector’s a bone here and make sure they are taken care of. We had a great response to the full sets, we don’t have many of these left, so let’s make them available only in full sets and make sure that our collectors who weren’t at Worlds have a good shot at a full set.” That is literally 100% of the thought process that went into this, Chris, Ben, and I all said “Yeah, that works” and then we got everything off to the retailers and got back to work on other things. We have lots of other things to worry about. This didn’t seem like a big deal at all. Not much stock? Make it a package deal. Problem solved. On to the next 50 things on our to-do lists.
If we’re guilty of anything it’s underestimating demand for something that we made on a lark and essentially backing ourselves into a corner with it. Was it shortsighted? Totally. Was it a malicious cash grab intend to tick people off? You’re assuming we thought about it that much. We really didn’t. We were all tired from Worlds and just trying to get these out the door and figured “Yeah, that seems like a fair way to deal with a tiny bit of inventory” and moved on.
I can totally understand being disappointed and irritated with us on this one. We bungled it a bit, and totally deserve that. But assuming it was a malicious decision on our part, or a cash grab (did you notice how cheap it was? We didn’t think it would sell if it wasn’t!) is pretty far off base.
