The last few months have been interesting.  We received a bad batch of wood that was out of tolerance and then we encountered a wood shortage.  We have spent the last few months working to source a new, reliable wood supply.  We managed to find spot supply, but the price simply wasn’t right and while we have located a new supplier, we have also been working to potentially pivot the business in a new direction.

As you may know, we are a small family business, and as the years have passed, more and more of our children have graduated and moved on to university.  At this point, we have one son graduated from university and working in IT, another working in IT with a year of college left, and our youngest son is about to go away to university.  That just leaves myself, my wife, and our two youngest children.  The labor situation, combined with the recent wood supply issues, forced us to analyze where we were headed and what we should do next.

The original genesis for the business happened when I was on a sabbatical.  I sought to fulfill a need I had for board game storage and I saw an opportunity to share with my children the challenges and value of small businesses in society. Mission accomplished.

A New Model

Our new model is a slight variation on the old business model – we will now sell our digital designs for personal or commercial use. This simplifies our supply chain and avoids the upcoming labor challenges we will face.  It does mean that we will generally not be producing our own designs for sell here.  We may sell specific designs in the future and we still have inventory of many of our designs, but those stocks are dwindling fast.  Instead, we will be focusing on producing designs for games and other things that you can purchase and use to cut your own organizers.  This will mean you will need access to a laser cutter/engraver.

We do understand that many people have no interest in purchasing a laser cutter.  They aren’t cheap.  Our Trotec lasers cost 35K – 55K.  However, there are many people now with lower-cost, imported lasers and the Glowforge guys are really killing it sales-wise.  While the Glowforge lasers and other small-format lasers don’t lend themselves to large-scale production, they are amazing home workshop lasers that get the job done and 40-watt lasers can certainly drive small home-based businesses, as Etsy has illustrated.

We are offering commercial licenses to our designs, so we hope to see our designs available from multiple commercial sources going forward.  While we are offering each individual design under a personal or commercial license, we are also open to licensing our entire catalog on an ongoing basis if there is interest.

Our Wonderful Customers

While this may sound like goodbye to most of you, I suspect it is not.  While you may not be buying physical products from us in the future, I suspect you will find new and existing businesses offering our designs in physical format for you to purchase.  If it is goodbye, the team here at Go7 Gaming would like to extend our heartfelt appreciation that you were a part of this amazing journey.  It has been a wonderful adventure and each and every one of you were a part of it.

Our Wonderful Retailers

While our model has always been direct customer fulfillment, let’s be honest.  We are shipping packages of wood and acrylic and shipping costs have continued to escalate in the decade+ we have been in business.  We have always paid special attention to sizing our kits so that they can be shipped for the lowest cost, but international shipping is very expensive.  This has always been an achilles heel that is very, very hard to overcome.  Wood weighs a lot…

We have been blessed to work with several retailers across the world that had the imagination to procure our products, import them, and sell locally.  This helped us to get our products into your hands at a reduced cost and we are thankful for these relationships.  I can honestly say every retailer we have sold through over the years are amazing and great people! They each embody the values and practices that we strive for in our business.  To each of you, I thank you for the opportunity to do business with you and wish you all of the success in the world.

A New Chapter Begins

The team is working hard to convert our existing designs into purchasable digital products that can be purchased under two license models – personal and commercial as quickly as we can.  Today, we are launching with ~30 of our latest/most popular designs and we will be adding additional designs over the coming weeks.  Ultimately, all of our designs will be available here.  We will also be adding new designs.  One of our specialties has always been big, multi-box designs for games from companies like CMON.  This will not change.  We love a design challenge and there is nothing more satisfying than collapsing 14 boxes into 5 or 6 boxes on our shelves!

In the meantime, we do have physical inventory of various organizers left and you are invited to grab what you need.  To help clear space in the workshop, we have a coupon you can use to save 30% on physical purchases: “2023P”.  The coupon will be valid through June 12, 2023. This might be your last chance to get some sweet receipt art drawn by our youngest.  Just leave an order note with your requests!