LAUNCH DAY: A Letter from the BAM Team about FORGED!
over 1 year ago
– Wed, Nov 16, 2022 at 10:06:16 AM
Greetings, adventurers!
Happy Wednesday to you, and THANK YOU for checking out Forged on Kickstarter. Our team has worked very hard for the last few months on building this campaign, and we hope you’ll join us on the adventure we’ve built just for you!
To those of you who are just coming across Forged for the first time, and are maybe unfamiliar with our team at Broken Anvil, we want to take this opportunity to introduce ourselves and catch you up on why this campaign is so special.
(Those of you who have been riding this crazy train from the start, you are the real MVPs. 🏆💕)
I’m Hanna, one of the co-founders of Broken Anvil Miniatures. If you’ve watched any of our livestreams, I am often hosting and sharing the latest studio news. I also frequently hang out in our Discord community and make dumb reaction gifs on occasion.
My team and I got started in the business of making miniatures in 2020 in the midst of the world turning upside down. My teammates are all very talented artists and designers who have one thing in common: we love minis. We have made all kinds of products for other companies, but building our own miniatures became the outlet that allowed us to be freely creative without a client to satisfy.
Our first big project, Dungeon Delvers (now fully shipped!) was a surprise hit for our team thanks to the support of more than 1500 people, and allowed us to make and ship nearly 100,000 minis of our own original design all around the world for the first time. From there, we started a Patreon mini STL subscription program called Broken Anvil Monthly that led to the creation of the over 800 miniatures in our current library.
We also started designing games, like our flagship tabletop skirmish wargame Rivenstone (midway through production at our HQ in Renton, WA and on track to ship worldwide in Q2 2023!) The team and I even maintain an online shop where we sell the minis we make to order on site at HQ.
But then came the idea for Forged: A Massive Miniature Collection. Game shops from all over the world have reached out to us because they love our sculpts, but our small team can only support so much manufacturing locally as we’ve focused on building Rivenstone from scratch and fulfilling online orders. Our longtime experience in manufacturing products for other companies overseas led us to approach one of our favorite factory partners to just see what it would take to convert some of our digital library into steel molds for affordable PVC production.
We worked closely with their engineering team to assess all our sculpt files and came to the conclusion that we were onto something! We set out to build the first version of this campaign on another crowdfunding platform and when Launch Day came… it didn’t quite go as planned.
A ton of our fans took the time to write to us with thoughtful suggestions and honest gut reactions to help guide us in the right direction since we’re new to selling our own designs. We even sent out a survey asking people to give us more feedback. We decided at that point it required we go back to the drawing board to offer a better selection of mini sculpts. So, we did! We retooled the Adventure Box and relaunched the next week after revising ALL of the graphics for clarity.
The second campaign did much better, but then we had a huge surprise breakthrough with our factory partner that unexpectedly lowered our tooling costs and opened the door to offer way more free stuff to backers! There was no way for us to share in the good fortune with the new campaign already underway, so we took a major risk. We relinquished the funding we had raised until that point to re-RE-launch here on Kickstarter in the hopes of unlocking as many free miniatures for our backers as possible.
(This Monty Python + the Holy Grail scene comes to mind… 👀)
Hence, FORGED is now on Kickstarter for its last hurrah! (No more re-launches, scout’s honor, our collective nerves at HQ can’t handle another one. 😵)
Thank you again, sincerely and eternally, to all of our BAM Fam members who took time out of their lives to help get us on the right track and make this campaign the absolute best version it could be. We are truly lucky to have so many of you wonderful folks out there watching our back when you don’t owe us a thing. If we succeed, it’s only because you helped us do so. This campaign is a direct reflection of all of your words of advice. ❤️
Here’s to a grand adventure alongside you all!
✌️ Hanna + The BAM Team
PS: For those of you who were burnt by a certain previous large-scale miniatures Kickstarter, we want to assure you that we’ve taken their project’s collapse very seriously in order to avoid their fatal mistakes. All of our miniatures (save for the dragons) have complete sculpts that have been assessed and priced out by our factory partner, a highly respected facility in the miniatures industry. We have taken great care to review our pricing repeatedly to ensure it is accurate and feasible to ensure success all the way down the line.
You are welcome to leave any questions or concerns you might have in the comments below, on the general comments section, or via email at [email protected]. We’re happy to chat with you!