News from the Front Lines
November 12th, 2012
Thoughts on Thanksgiving
You know, it's not easy being a woman in the gaming business. I'm sure you've all read articles about how women get treated in the various geek and nerd groups. But you know what? While I do experience these things on occasion there has been one place where this has never happened.
At Advanced Deployment.
Every single one of my customers have been kind, open and understanding. This isn't to say I've never had to make a refund, or I've never had someone be unhappy with the way a transaction/shipping/a product has gone. But I can tell you this, I've never had someone disrespect me for being female. Now granted, I know, even after over a year of business some folks don't realize that Advanced Deployment is pretty much a one-man-show that happens to be ran by a woman, but still, many folks do know it's a lady behind the curtain here, and you've never looked down on me for that.
This is a rare thing. And honestly, the worst that has happened to me so far is having someone come up to Dusty and mistake him for me. Sure, it's annoying that someones assumption is that the guy runs the show, but you know what, that IS the industry standard, so I can't even be that annoyed. Besides there was always an apology on hand, and if anything a look of “GG” when they realize that it's me running this joint.
So yeah, I just want to say to all of you, that Advanced Deployment has the best fans and customers in all of Geekdom. Thank you for making my dreams a reality, thank you for sticking through all the ups and downs of a one-person entrepreneurship, and thank you always for all the ideas you throw my way. You are all really the best, and are keeping me in a little spoiled bubble of awesome where regardless of gender we're just good to each other!
Have a Wonderful Holiday!
-Ravyn Schmidt
September 9th, 2012
We've been working on some really cool things, switching focus from the Realms series to a new series of cheaper terrain options for gamers. Realms is fun, with all it's bright colors and the fact that it locks together, but the time it takes to design it, and with all those textures it just takes so long to print them that if anything I loose money on them. So I've been thinking about how to make cool terrain to fill up a board with out breaking the bank....
We decided to cut out the extra time to engrave all the details, and make the buildings glue together rather than peg and hole, and add a whole bunch of extras to decorate the buildings with. This gives us some great oppertunites to make base buildings, delux buildings and themed accessory sets, and try keep everything at or under $10! You can't beat that!
Where Will You Go With This?
Good Question! Our first releases will consist of the buildings and a handful of accessories. In the future I plan to have the option to buy the buildings plain, as well as buying accessory kits to go along with them, so you can have the option to make your buildings futeristic, steamunk, fantasy or wild west! We also are looking at having buildings with texture in the future!
August 10th, 2012
Only a month behind. Well, with our old Mac turing into a brick on us it took me a while to get everything up and running again! But here we are and with any luck, I'll have things right as rain. From here foward we're hoping to have weekly updates on the site. So keep your fingers crossed that we'll actually be able to pull that off!
How did we Forget Smoke?
I got an email the other day by someone asking if we could please provide a "Smoke" option from the dropdown, since we had it on our example of acrylics. It took me by suprise because I didn't realize for...who know's how long...we've not had a smoke option in the store. I...I don't even know how that is possible to miss. But the more I thought about it, the more it made a sick sort of sence that we were missing that color. I was like..."You know, come to think of it, no one has ordered a MK accessory kit in smoke..." Go figure. So, Good News! We've got that color in the system!
Huzzah!