Merchandise

What to do with photos?

TL;DR

As in the case with the "Globe", look at the merch through the eyes of a buyer.
What does the buyer expect from the purchase? What will he do with it? For example, a guy buys a t-shirt to emphasize his style in public, so it requires interesting design and shouldn't display anything obscene (people rarely wear obscene stuff). To decorate his cafe, the guy will probably choose the 4x3 framed poster (not a cheap one), so the photos should be well edited (and probably shouldn't contain unicorns). Some of the items may appear in a sex shop (on a wall or on a counter for resale) - people there are ok with porn, but they don't have a lot of customers.

You should also take into account the storage place. A poster in a wooden frame requires much more space than a rolled up cheap poster. Even more space would be needed for a 1000 of framed posters. Try to produce small batches of merch to save some storage money. On the other hand, the greater the total number of products the less the cost of each separate instance.

Additional options (like "marked sunny days" for calendars and "can be washed" for t-shirts, etc.) improve the quality of products unless the initial photos are bad.

Taking photos

While shooting, move the mouse over the icon of a camera. Choose whether you want to hire a photographer (good choice) and how would you describe the type of photos (the level of publicity) for him. The photographer will arrive in an hour and you'll see the following block:
Photo shoots are exhausting for actors, however, good pictures can bring a lot of money. While in the fast mode, photo shoots don't involve additional actions (key moments) (reducing the quality of the scene).

Quality of photos

The quality of raw photos is affected by:

• photographer's skill - even a good photographer can't guarantee a masterpiece
  
• actors' skills in chosen genre (the genre of the scene)
  
• the abilities of actors to express emotions and feel the camera - it is not great if these skills are less than 70%.

Influence of the genre and the level of publicity on the quality:

Product	Romance	Vanilla	Extreme	SFW	Teasing	Private
Desktop calendar	+		+		+
Wall calendar		+	-	+		-
Poster 1x5 framed	+	-	+	-	+	+
Poster 4x3 framed		+		+		-
Poster cheap			+	-		+
T-shirt	+	+		+	+	-

Photo editing (retouch) and design

Raw photos should be edited and for that we need freelancers.

Click on the merch icon in the top menu and click "details" on one of the photo shoots:

You'll see a window with photo shoot data:
Here you can see the main data. According to actors' skills (15%) the quality of the product will be low. You can also see the artistic value of each design (style). By the way, if you read the text in this window carefully, you'll find a half of this tutorial :)

One photo shoot can be edited in different ways. Editing is not always successful - you'll often have to order a few alternatives (for the same style). In addition, different products look good in different styles (and one photo shoot can be used for multiple products).

Let's try to order the most simple design:
Here you can see the freelancers. Every freelancer promises you high quality (%) and fast execution, but those are not always true. Consider offers from people you've previously worked with the most reliable. The price doesn't affect the quality much. Choose any one.

The higher the artistic value, the higher the price of work and the longer the execution time:

The freelancers tell you when the job will be done. At this stage people also overestimate themselves, especially if they have already been paid:

Finished photos

After editing is done, the finished photos will appear as circles.

The higher the circle, the higher the quality.

It is not only important "how well" the work is done, the difficulty of chosen style (and the related artistic value) also matters. Technically, the artistic value is a number of points in the range from 0 (on the left) to 100 (on the right) - the circle can be somewhere in between the styles and that is totally fine.


Optimal number of points of artistic value for different products:

Product	%
Desktop calendar	40 - "utopia"
Wall calendar	20 - "as web"
Poster 1x5 framed	70 - "flowers"
Poster 4x3 framed	50 - "stars and borders"
Poster cheap	10 - "ctrl+m"
T-shirt	100 - "zombie-robots"

Click on the circle to go to the product selection:

Printed products

There are several types of printed products. Each product has the following properties:

• manufacturing cost - the larger the batch, the less expensive a single item is
  sale price
  
• sale price
  
• storage space - the warehouse takes money for safekeeping on a daily basis (large size products require higher costs)

Nedeed storage space:

Product	Units
Desktop calendar	3
Wall calendar	5
Poster 1x5 framed	20
Poster 4x3 framed	7
Poster cheap	1
T-shirt	10

The "income" column shows exactly the income, not the profit: the manufacturing cost, photo shoot cost and storage cost are not taken into account. If you're expecting to get 20k while spending 10k on printing and 19k on storage, you'll be in the red.

The number of additional options affects the quality of the products and (very significantly) their price.

Printing takes a few days. You're able to print out new copies at any time.
The printing status is displayed in the photo shoot page.

For convenience the merch popup contains the information on the products and their status.

If a particular product does not make money for a long period of time, it's better to throw it out (instead of paying for the storage).

Quality of products

Each product gets points in the range from 0 to 10. The quality equally depends on:

• photographer's skill
  
• actors skills in the genre of the scene and their ability to act (see above)
  
• design quality (style)
  
• compatibility of the product and chosen design (style)
  
• compatibility of the product and chosen genre (romance, casual, extreme)
  
• compatibility of the product and the level of publicity ("for office", "for myself")
  
• additional options

The actual value will be known only after selling 50-100 instances of the product (make the first batch the trial one). You can find out which factors are good and which are bad at the stage of printing:
After selling the first copies you'll see the number of quality points and a short summary:

Sales

The "Print & Sell" company is responsible for printing, storing and selling. You just have to make a quality product. It is the quality (0 to 10) what determines the number of buyers.

Obviously, there are some limitations. The number of people who buy printed products is relatively small. You won't be able to sell a billion of identical calendars. Even if it is the best calendar ever made. 10000 sold copies of one product is an awesome result! Same goes for actors. If a guy already has some actress on a poster, he will probably want another actress for the second poster.

There are regular customers who are always looking for fresh stuff. Maybe they are from other stores and want to resell our products - it's ok, we still get profit. The most favorable format for the new product is 1x5 poster . The number of sold copies determines whether a product is still a new thing. Milestone values are: 100, 500, 1000, and 10000 items sold. The speed of selling changes smoothly: 101st to 110th calendars are sold a little slower than the 91st to 100th calendars, but the speed of 401st to 410th calendars is closer to that of the 500th calendar.

Impact of the novelty factor on the number of buyers:

Product	First 100 and 100th sale	500th	1'000th	10'000th and more
Desktop calendar	1.5	1.0	1.0	0.01
Wall calendar	2.0	1.0	0.7	0.01
Poster 1x5 framed	5.0	0.1	0.1	0.01
Poster 4x3 framed	3.0	0.7	0.7	0.01
Poster cheap	0.5	1.0	1.0	0.01
T-shirt	0.7	0.3	0.05	0.01

Also

You can see product sales for each actress:

There is a summary of products, regardless of photo shoots:

[Corwin86]

Finally, I couldn't understand well how to make some money with merchandise :)