Makeship Plushie Campaign Process and Retrospective

Yesterday, my plushie campaign with Makeship concluded with 1407 Skye plushies sold! This was way beyond what I expected at the start of the campaign, so I'm actually super happy with how everything worked out.

Process

Makeship, if you're unfamiliar with them, works with creators to make plush dolls of their characters or personas, and sells them for a limited time through crowdfunding campaigns. Each campaign lasts 21 days, and a minimum 200 units need to be sold for the campaign to succeed and the plush dolls to be made.

It seems like Makeship tended to focus more on making plush dolls of YouTube creators, but recently started partnering with more Twitter/Instagram artists to make plushies of their original characters. I think I was one of the earlier ones to get contacted by them, but now basically everyone in the corner of Art Twitter I'm in is in the process of making one too. I'm going to be spending so much money supporting my artist friends in the next few months...

The process was pretty easy on my end, and they were very nice to work with. Basically all I needed to do was give them a bunch of pictures of Skye, and told them to make a plushie of her holding a burger. They made the design, we went back and forth for a few revisions, and they sent me the first sample. I suggested more changes, and they sent me the second sample, and since I was satisfied, we decided on a date, and I wrote up a little comic and storyline for the campaign that I thought would be an entertaining way to market the thing. This whole process took from early July to mid October.

The Campaign

I was super nervous about not being able to sell 200 Skye plushies and the looming disaster for my self-esteem should the campaign fail after 21 days. Basically my entire goal for the campaign was to sell 200, and any more would just be a bonus to me.

We reached 200 sales in less than a day.

While I was ecstatic that my self-esteem would survive the campaign, I had to scramble to make a new goal so the comics I had planned to post throughout the campaign with Skye trying to sell these plushies would still make sense. So I made Blythe change the goal to 400.

Of course that didn't last long either...

Anyway I had Blythe change the goal to something I thought would take a while to reach if at all, so I chose 800, a nice round double the previous goal.

That bought me some time to actually draw these comics, which I had a lot of fun doing.

You can read the whole saga on Twitter here.

• Skye's New Assignment 
• Blythe alters the goal 
• Skye's Weekend 
• Blythe did not expect this 
• Skye's Work-Life Balance 
• Skye's orders from upper management 
• Sales Record 
• Thank You 

This was the most comics I've ever made in a 3 week period, and certainly the most times I've drawn Blythe ever. Even though these were made for the plushie campaign, I tried to tie it to the lore of the Endless Monday world and have them react to sales figures that were being met in real life, and I'm really happy that this ended up being entertaining even to people who weren't necessarily interested in buying anything.

During the campaign, Makeship also did a creator spotlight that I answered a bunch of questions for, which people seemed to like too. I should do more Q&A stuff if people are interested in that...

Aftermath

I'm unsure if the cut the creator gets is public, so I'll just say it was a pretty decent chunk of change and I'm happy with it :)

Also there's probably going to be a Blythe plushie lol. Date TBD

The public success of the campaign also seems to have caught the attention of some potential new merch partners, so I'm following up with that. Stay tuned, maybe...

A lot of my artist buddies are hopping on the Makeship plushie train, and they've been energized by what they saw with my campaign, so please support them when they start their campaigns as well! Well... if your wallet will allow it, anyway.

Most importantly, though, the campaign helped me realize that hey, my fans are awesome and so supportive, and maybe I can potentially make this side gig a more than side gig someday...

And a big thank you to Makeship for this awesome collab!

Anyway, that's a lot of words, so I'll let you go. Thanks for supporting me, as always!