What's good fam! This week (23rd Jul) we dropped the Entry Mods - our new series of simple kendamas with the intent of letting as many people try the Performer shape as possible.
At $30USD for 2 kendamas - this is the most affordable kendama we've ever offered. Naturally it would raise certain questions and this blog post is meant to answer it all.
tl/dr: slightly lower costs, and much less profit but more players can try our shape
#1: The Price of Our Goal
Since launching the Performer shape, we have received a ton of great feedback about how it jams. This made it our goal to get the shape into as many hands as possible in order for players to experience it.
We also acknowledge that not everyone may want to shell out $40USD to try something new - so we bit the bullet.
With that goal in mind, the Entry Mods apply a somewhat "loss leader" model where our goal is to just break even on the kendama but benefit long term when players are delighted by our shape.
#2: Simplicity in Design
A more complex design would have resulted in a higher cost price. To keep it priced at $30 for 2, we opted to not use any coloured paint, but instead burn lines to demarkate the scope, stripe and top tracking.
In addition to that, we have chosen to use beech for the ken and tama as it is slightly cheaper to produce.
#3: No Frills
Another cost saving measure we did was to not produce our signature upsized bags with these mods. We felt that while many users may like the dama bags, it would get in the way of our goal of bringing the price as low as possible. (they still come with stickers though!)
#4: Only Sold in Bundles
Selling in sets of 2 or 3 ensures that DHL is used for all transactions. This saves us time of transporting the damas to a post office as DHL picks up direct from us and reduces the amount of missing parcels from local carriers like USPS.
We then pass along these savings to the player by lowering the price of the kendamas itself.
#5: Do You Still Get The Full Experience?
We believe so! Other than it being beech wood and not having colour on the tamas, these mods are as close to any other Performer design you can get.
The same stick and grip paint is applied, they still come with metal bearings and we have not changed the bevel. At this price, there's almost no downside to getting an Entry Mod.
#6: Will Cereal Make Coloured Versions of These?
That is something we have considered, but in all honesty we want to keep the prices as close to $30 for 2 as possible and right now with our smaller production runs we cannot get the cost down for a fully painted tama to meet that. Definitely on our drawing board though!
We hope that this has answered most of the questions you may have - if you have not already, check out the Entry Mods by clicking the image below.
