Boss Fight Studio Year in Review

Boss Fight had a challenging but incredible 2020. It was a difficult year in the toy industry. Factory shutdowns in China delayed production and without the ability to travel and approve products in real time, our jobs got harder. We were lucky that our factory came back after a 5-month shutdown. But they were operating at 20% staff!

This meant we had to innovate. How did we do this? 

 

  • We got really good at approving most things over video. Is this our ideal scenario? No. But you work with what you’ve got. 
  • We prioritized projects as effectively as we could. With 20% factory staff not everything is going to get done, but projects that were already in progress could move faster.
  • We are setting ourselves up for full swing when pandemic allows. We’ve worked really hard to get tooling setup for future full production runs. This meant our sculptors (who sculpt by hand to get all those amazing details!) have been on full steam ahead to keep things moving and have a backlog of projects ready to go. Our Art Director has been getting packaging lined up, and our Partners have been designing lots of great product and working through the licensor approvals. 

We also saw how the shutdowns were affecting our customers and we wanted to do everything we could to support them and keep them entertained. This meant we looked for new ways to do things and doubled down on what we could provide, even as new product rolled in slower than expected. So what did we do?

  • We commissioned our writer to create several short stories and offered them as free downloadable content. We also provided coloring pages of some of our more popular characters as downloadable items. We loved seeing what our customers and their kids created!
  • We quickly worked as a team to figure out the best way to offer our popular customizing classes in a virtual format. It started as an option for our customizing audience to have something fun during lockdowns early on, and became so popular we’ve actually made it a regular item! We’ve continually taken customer feedback and comments and modified each class to be better than the last. Wait until you guys see some of the creations for our 2021 classes!
  • We created a new series of Boss Fight Live events – sometimes just our team, sometimes partnering with our licensors and partners – to keep our fans entertained and talk about the process of making toys and how that differs from each brand we touch. This is another pandemic offering that is going to stick around! 
  • We looked at new product offerings that would surprise and delight our customers! This included the first ever H.A.C.K.S. advent calendar, new bundles of products including our first ever customizing bundle with instruction sheet, and the evolution of our popular mystery boxes into our brand new subscription boxes to bring a little monthly joy! These items were all born out of brainstorming sessions we held thinking “what makes us happy?” and turned them into products we thought would make our customers happy.

So there ya go. This is certainly not everything, but it’s a great high level look at the highlights of 2020! Have questions?

Reach out to us at info@bossfightstudio.com