By the Staff of Funagain Games:
History & Future:
Now that the majority of our online warehouse inventory is cleaned out (thank you for your business on a very successful sale), it is time to let you know about the exciting plans we have been laying the past three months for the future of Funagain Games. We left two clues for you on the front page of our website when we announced the warehouse clearance sale. Were you able to see this coming??
Many of you may know that four years ago, Funagain started to begin to use our shipping systems and expertise to help Kickstarter creators and smaller game publishers both in the United States and around the world ship out their backer rewards at a very low cost. That business grew exponentially for us as there was great demand for these services given the rapid growth in the boardgame hobby and the great number of creative smaller publishers using Kickstarter as a platform to release games. We embraced that trend early and saw it for what it was going to do to change our industry.
By 2017, we grew to the point where we controlled approximately 25% of the Kickstarter game fulfillment market, including games like Scythe, Gloomhaven, Mythic Battles: Pantheon, Keyper, Anachrony, Factory Funner, Crisis, Dinosaur Island and hundreds of others. Today we have nearly 100 publishers in our large warehouse and we continue to service their warehouse and project fulfillment needs. This includes daily fulfillment where we serve as the back-end to their own websites. We never stopped providing these services and will focus on it as our core business going forward. We are in the process of opening an East Coast warehouse to allow us to provide nation-wide zone optimization and 2-day shipping to anywhere in the Continental US. Stay tuned.
Given the deterioration in the general retail environment, led by the behemoth Amazon, we learned there was no longer any money to be made in online retailing and decided three months ago to liquidate that inventory and cease general retailing of boardgames online. We have two amazing brick-and-mortar stores and those are doing well and will continue to operate as game lounges/cafes open late 7-days a week serving food, refreshments, and even adult beverages.
Funagain Games will become your primary destination for hard-to-find board games from around the world. Historically, we always worked hard to do this and have hundreds of relationships with game publishers both big and small in nearly every country in the world that has game publishers. Starting with our Essen Mule Service, we strived for 22 years to import, translate (in the early days) and bring to you our customers these hard-to-find import and exclusive games. Many of you have shared feedback about how Funagain was the place where you learned about this hobby, even before BoardGameGeek. We were usually the only place these games could be found, since we imported them directly and in large quantities to the US, often by airplane.
We are going to continue to do this as it is our strength and all those relationships remain in place. The Essen mule service and imports from Taiwan and Japan will continue. We will also strive to provide access to all the great Kickstarter games in our warehouse after the initial projects are completed. Many of these games will also be exclusively sold on our website, as we have in the past. You will continue to find great deals on somewhat older games that have reached the end of their product cycle and the publisher is trying to liquidate in order to raise cash to fund their next game. This is known as “game remaindering” in the industry and we are very good at it and have always done some of it, as you know from our check-out sale offerings. We will increase our focus on this.
We want to continue to be the place where hobbyists go to get games they cannot find anywhere else. It is our roots and it is who we are. Nothing has changed. We have a deep passion for the boardgame hobby from our inception 22 years ago in 1996. Many of you may not know this, but “Funagain” came from the original idea of recycling and re-collating boardgames from used copies (stuck in family closets) into complete sets and then re-selling them for churches and schools as a fund-raising activity. Our original logo was the RECYCLE logo.
Now we are putting that basic founding philosophy to work on ourselves. We are re-creating Funagain and making it “Funagain.”
So stay tuned for exciting changes and offerings in the months ahead and we will see many of you at GenCon, Essen, and BGG.Con, as usual. Anyone interested in getting more information about our services can contact me directly at jeffd@funagain.com and I will be happy to provide more info and answer any questions you have. Send weight and dimensions for your upcoming Kickstarter projects and I will be happy to give you a custom quote for fulfillment and post-campaign warehouse services and retail/distribution support.
We will be making announcements and further updates from time to time through our customer e-mail list and you may subscribe when you purchase a product from the sale to follow the next stage of Funagain Games. You can also let me know you would like to be added and I can do that manually for you. We will also have many exciting products offered for you to consider from our own website as well as from many of our warehouse/fulfillment customers and their upcoming Kickstarter campaigns. Many of you may have noticed this important change in our focus if you are already on our e-mail list.
Funagain is back with even more passion, focus, and energy.
Happy Gaming!!
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