I want to thank everyone who had provided interest and support in my brief foray into the inflatable distribution market. It's a risky business, do I took some steps to see how much genuine interest there might be. I realize there is more I could have done, and have taken notes on things we did right and wrong. For now, it's not a good time to fully dedicate to this gamble. I do intend to come back to this project, though it may be a few years before I do. Maybe by then, someone else will pick up this idea and really find a way to make it work. But, for now, I'm afraid my concert for "Unique Thrills" if put on an indefinite hold.

So, we have watched the tallies, and seem what people consider their favorite toy. And now, we've opened up pre-orders for it!
This pre-order process is not how we anticipate our long term business model, but we think trying this out a couple of times may help us to establish a true understanding of the potential interest in the services offered.
To see which toy has been most liked, or to get on the pre-order post, click the link below.
https://twolfhound.wixsite.com/uniq.....rills/preorder

So, some people may be wondering 'when will these things be available??'
Right now, I have a toy on eBay that is being sold (sale ends on May 20). From that, we're looking at funding the business startup costs. It's here that we'll establish the business name, finalize the website details, etc. We expect this process to take about a week (finished around May 27). From there, we hope to make our first initial order of 5 of the most popular toys (ten of each one), and once the order is made we will be opening up for pre-orders. Pre-orders will obviously be fulfilled first. Once the products arrive, Pre-orders will obviously become orders. We hoping to be taking orders and shipping out orders maybe two to three weeks after the business finalization process (so hopefully sometime between June 17 - 24).

This is our hopeful timeline, subject to change. But, we'll be keeping people informed as we progress through the phases.

So, as I've stated elsewhere, my intent is to make otherwise expensive products more affordable to the inflatophile community. Currently, the main producer I'm looking at going through is the China company HongYI. Individually, their products are just as pricey as anyone. But, bought in mass production, they become quickly drastically cheaper. When I first started dealing with them, they had products I had never seen anywhere else, leading me to believe that they are original content providers. Then, I posted up what was being offered, and found out otherwise. At this point, I had found a couple of products that had not only been created by someone else, but that the someone else was quite irate about the idea of someone else stealing their idea.

And all this is understandable. And if someone had sent me a message simply stating 'hey, this is my product, you can't offer it up', I'd acknowledge the mistake and remove the product. Easy, simple, no harm, no foul, right? But, that's not how things work, is it? No respect. No subtlety. Instead, anyone with such issues have decided the best idea is to completely blast the entire project on the main page. Which, hey, that's great. Meaning, I can respectfully deal with their issue and remove the offending project, but their comments remain, permanently scarring the intent and message of the entire project.

I was told that this kind of idea had been attempted in the past, by a few others. I wondered how, with such a strong interest in such a thing, they wouldn't have remained in business. But, now I'm starting to understand. There's two ways to handle something like this... On one hand, a person can discretely inform the offending party that there is an issue, and work to help make such a business better, while at the same time protecting their own property. Actually, something like this could even be good for content creators, as it could become a venue in which they may be able to mass market their ideas. Or, the second way, where a person is so offended that their one creation was accidently claimed by the company, and thus they make it their mission to do everything they can to destroy such a company. This community can be helpful or hurtful to such a project.

I am very open to criticism and will take on any ideas to help improve things. I have NO intention of taking someone else's work. I try to be very clear about where I get my stuff from, and my intent. However, to my knowledge, there is no centralized database of all intellectual property, and I have no way of being able to determine if anything posted isn't already from somewhere else, save for some major organization like IW or PP (and I do try to regularly check those to make sure). To be honest, it never even occurred to me that maybe HongYI would have stolen such ideas from others, and once I'm made aware, I've trying to search such things a lot more in depth.
But I wasn't addressed with respect. There is clearly no interest in designers to be constructive or helpful to make this kind of thing work for the community as a whole. And, it has left me stopped and debating if I even want to create this kind of service for this community. The funny thing is, any toys that have been called, thus far, for plagiarism, weren't even popular products.


I want to do this the right way. You can help me do that. Or, you can help to destroy what is meant to be a good intent for a very tight niche community. If you want to see this kind of project get taken down, then don't you worry, it'll happen. But, it's going to take away a valuable service for so many just because you got offended for a few minutes. The idea that a person immediately results to publicly announcing they seek to threaten legal retaliation before even so much as mentioning that their IP has been stolen...
Just pure disrespect.

So, before I say anything further, I feel it should be established why I'm attempting to build up this kind of business.
See, I've been buying inflatables for years. Most of my life, in fact. And one of my biggest complaints has always been how limited our options are. Then, we started seeing producers of individual products, or mass producers of limited runs. Now, getting your custom job done is hardly a problem, however it is still very expensive. There is still almost no mass production, save for maybe someplace like InflatableWorld.de. Even then, they are very family friendly products.

I realized, if these specialty items could just be mass produced, they could be made more cheaply, better and easier to get for the masses. Enter HongYI, makers of all kinds of inflatable products, including custom designs. I spoke with them for a bit and found that if they had mass orders, their products would become significantly cheaper, making these things more affordable. Of course, no one is going to buy 10 of an item just to get it cheaper. There is the possibility of getting a small group of people together to all try to buy it a little cheaper, kind of the model PuffyPaws uses. Not a bad model, but not feasible for everyone to find ten others of similar interest.
So, what it really needs is someone willing to take on the gamble to buy these products en masse, and hope that they can be able to sell for a modest profit, while still making these things available and affordable to everyone. Less customized, yes, but hopefully the product is satisfactory on its own, without customization. This is, after all, how mass production works in any other business.

I was surprised to find there is no one else offering up this kind of service, and felt that maybe it is a service long overdue. So, I have been giving serious consideration to filling in this hole in the market. But, the only way to succeed in this is with the support of the community. No business can be run without customer support. But, because this is such a niche market, the consumer in this case has even greater say than they would in a much bigger market. But, it also means that negativity from the community can more drastically hurt such a plan.

So, my hope is that others see the same need for this service that I do. Frankly, I rather not be the one to take on this risk, but as I haven't been able to find anyone else who will, I'm making my moves to do so. If someone else would rather, I'd be glad to help out and completely abandon my plans to do so. But, until that time... I just hope I can get the same support from others that I myself would offer so that we can bring success to what I see as a much needed service.

~ Trench Wolfhound