2022 Year in Review and Updates!

Thank you to everyone who has supported us this past year. We've had a hectic time due to several events that have happened, and I apologize for all the delays due to illness and personal events that have happened. We are now currently all caught up on orders, which were shipped this past week. Once again, thank you for your patience and support. We had several inquiries into our usual Black Friday Sale, and due to health issues and me being out of town at the start of January, I decided to postpone it until the start of the year as a New Year's Sale. The normal Black Friday discount will be available from January 1st until the 7th, giving you plenty of time to order. We will begin fulfilling orders on the 9th when I get back into town.

Experimental Options

Moving on, I'd like to announce our first "Experimental" release, which is a bicolored model with a different belly tone. I worked on this earlier this year, and sent out a few to be tested. This one was left over, and will now be in the shop for purchase. Feel free to check it out, and if you're lucky you might snag the first! I hope to fully introduce the bicolored models as a product option later this year, but if you are interested feel free to let me know when you place your order.

Product Photos!

As you may have noticed, that's a product photo! I gave up on finding a willing photographer since so few in my area were willing to work with me for a reasonable price, so I purchased a photography lightbox, some lights, and decided to just do it myself. While not studio quality, I hope what photos I can take will suffice for now. Once we are more established and can afford to hire a professional, I still hope to do so. In addition, I have updated the original Thotter page with a few photos from our last sale. The 3D images will stay up so that you can see it from all angles as I can't stand it up in the lightbox well, but hopefully this helps! I know more than a few people were concerned with the product page, and I fully understand the fear of online scams. They are far too frequent in general, and even more so in both the furry fandom and in sex toys. I hope these photos assuage some of those concerns, and that they help you see how great this product is!

2023 and Beyond

Looking forward into 2023, I'd like to put a few thoughts out.

First, I hope that what I do can grow, and as such I hope to have bicolored models available by Summer. There's a lot to learn and many processes to iron out, and they almost double the production time, so it will likely have an additional cost. I'm currently talking with my testing groups, and am taking feedback on what people feel is appropriate.

Second, one goal I would really like to finally accomplish is to expand the store. As much as I adore the Thotter, many have suggested additional products to help fill it out. If out there among you who read this, there is one of you know how to model and would be interested, please let me know if you would be willing to work with me in the future. I'd love to work with fans to make new ideas come to life. I'm currently hoping to do either a rabbit or perhaps a ferret/weasel, but nothing is set in stone and it depends on how things go. I would love to add more right now, or over the past year, but right now I am averaging 1-2 orders a month, and it takes a lot of money to hire talented 3D artists for this level of complex design. I've always tried to be open and honest when people reach out to me, and I'd like to be transparent here. This business is first and foremost a love letter to the furry community, as I wanted to do something truly unique and new. While I feel like I have done that, I'm not earning much more enough than paying the bills for the website and materials.

Third, and tied to that last one, I would like to officially start taking applications for the Partnership Program. I simply can't afford major advertising, even on the few places that allow this style of content. Partners will receive special discounts, be allowed to test new designs and features early, and will receive a portion of each sale whenever someone uses their promo code. I hope that this will help more people find out about us, and help content creators and other individuals as well. If you are interested, please fill out a contact form! Lastly, I am working on rebuilding the Discord. Early on, I had a Discord so people could give feedback, but my account was compromised and I felt discouraged from trying again. I hope to be able to invite you back into the new server near the end of January to ask questions, talk about things, and help build a community.

Thank you for a wonderful year, and may next year bring joy, happiness, and success to all of you who have supported us! Take care, and have a marvelous day.

~K.C.

Annual Black Friday Sale!

To begin this post, I would like to thank all our pre-order customers for being patient while we have been working on making sure everything is up to par. Some of you have been with us many months, and we appreciate the commitment to the end product.

And on that topic, I am very excited to announce we are entering full production! That's right, everything is set to go, and orders will begin production next Monday. All pre-orders will be fulfilled first come first serve. We are also working to get a good photo set ready to go for our website, which should hopefully be done within the next two weeks. However, due to the timing of our full release, and the aforementioned lack of pictures, we decided to leave the pre-order pricing through Monday to give everyone one last chance to grab it at a significant discount.

On Monday, we will be ending pre-order pricing and moving the price up to 400$ plus shipping. We're extremely excited to get the ball rolling! We are also going to begin to accept people into our Partnership program in the near future, so if you are interested please submit a contact form and we will get in touch when we open it up.

-KC

What's Up, Doc?

Howdy folks, it's been a while.

Needless to say, things have been quiet for a while. We've kept everyone who pre-ordered up to date, but have erred on the side of caution since missing our goal for launch. Anyways, this post is a bit of a catchup to get the game rolling again.

So what happened?

Initially when we first set up our site and started outreach, we were planning to take pre-orders in November and launch production within the first weeks of December. We had a handful of manufacturers we had reached out to to help make a mold, but over time they all fell through. Some of the estimates were over 100k for a single piece of a very complicated mold, and others simply ghosted us. We're not naming names- no shaming here.

But as time went on, our team spent a lot of time learning about the manufacturing processes themselves. 3D printing, CNC milling, and more. Eventually we shifted away from having someone else make our molds to wanting to do it in-house. By doing that, we not only could tweak designs and replace parts on the fly, but vastly speed up any expansion we will hopefully soon need.

And that leads us to May. In early May we reached out to several 3D printing manufacturers to see who would be the best fit for our needs. Eventually we narrowed it down to a handful, and on July 9th we got our printer delivered to our doorstep. Let me just say, this thing can print some reaaaaally big stuff. Since then we've been fine tuning and testing over and over, and today? Today we just started the first of the mold pieces. You do not want to know the print time on these things, but to be safe we upgraded our workspace to have a simulated sine wave UPS with 2 hours backup power in case of power surges and storm outages. Dang thing is used for servers, so this printer gonna keep on trucking.

Over the next month, we'll be answering questions on Twitter @KoboldCreations and sharing some photos of our projects as it progresses.