On the 2nd December we finished shipping all copies of Assembly to UK backers and we started to prepare for the release of Assembly on Amazon UK. We wanted to make sure that our UK backers got their copies first so we shipped to them first, then to our pre-orders (retailers & individuals) and then finally to the Amazon fulfilment centre.
On the 10th December 2018, we launched Assembly on Amazon. I use that term ‘launch’ in the loosest possible way as what actually happened was we quietly put a listing up, played around with some settings and then told a few folk through Facebook that we’d put the listing up and asked for some feedback. To our surprise, bewilderment and delight we started selling copies. How were people finding us? We didn’t recognise most of the names of the buyers. We were truly confused as to who would want to buy this completely unknown game.
We originally sent 36 copies to the Amazon fulfilment centre as a trial thinking that should last us until the new year. 3 days later were were down to our last 10 copies so Janice quickly packaged up several more boxes during her lunch-break at work (real work!) and got them into the Amazon supply chain literally just before we ran out. And not only did we run out, but we also made the #1 spot for ‘Hot New Releases’ in our category (travel games) and peaked on 22nd December as the 3rd hottest new release in the entirety of the games category on Amazon UK, beating Monopoly Fortnite! Plus we’ve somehow got an ‘Amazon’s Choice’ badge. I must admit we’re still learning how Amazon works and not quite sure what all of this means but it seems good so we’re going to just go with it and cross our fingers whilst we try and work out what we’re doing right!
As we’ve said before, when we planned on launched the Assembly campaign, we expected to fail. Kickstarter is a really tough platform now and we were relatively unknown. We had a small mailing list and a small following on social media but it seems we did something right else you wouldn’t be reading this now. So thank-you everyone for supporting us. We are truly humbled and constantly surprised at how well Assembly is doing – well beyond anything we imagined. We were terrified about the minimum order quantity of 1000 units when we started planning, but before even having the games in our hands we had sold 1,200 copies to both backers and to retailers.
At this point, we must say a massive thank-you to our retailers who trusted in Assembly, enough to buy it before release. So thank-you so much and if you’d like to support your FLGS, then please visit one of these wonderful stores below. If you’re not in the UK and you’d like your FLGS to stock Assembly, then get them to contact us and we’ll see what we can do!
