We manufacture all of the wooden pieces ourselves using laser engravers. Since it is not usually typical for small, independent game designers to also manufacture major components for their own games, I thought that I’d like to talk about both why and how I will be doing that.

To give some quick background, my wife Elise and I have been running our company, Art of Steel, for over 7 years now. We started it from nothing and built it up to be a pretty big deal. We are the only 2 employees and we make a pretty good team. What do we do in our company? We make products with laser engravers and ship them all over the world to customers who order them online. In the last 12 months, we have made and shipped products for well over 4,000 individual orders and we offer more than 100 different items in addition to the many custom ordered products that we make. We have 4 laser machines, the largest of which has a cutting bed of 36 inches x 55 inches When we started developing this game, it just made sense for us to manufacture everything that we could ourselves.

What does this mean for you, the customer?

The game costs less. We are able to cut out a lot of middle-men as well as the costs of having items shipped from other companies to us. We are able to streamline the process and use of materials to maximize efficiency and savings.
We can fulfill pledges much faster. Before the campaign even ended, we had the majority of these parts already made and ready to go.
We can ensure excellent quality. We aren’t simply sending designs off to a manufacturer (probably overseas) and hoping that they do a good job with them. We are the manufacturer and we have already put a lot of time into perfecting the designs AND perfecting the manufacturing processes that go into making those designs a reality. We have been able to do several iterations of each component: making it, testing it, making small improvements to the design, and then making it again with the improvements. We will personally assemble each game and make sure that not only are all of the components in the box, but that they all meet our quality standards.

Do you manufacture all of the components yourselves?

No. We take advantage of specialization. We are great at design, laser-cutting, painting, and shipping, but we do not have the expertise or machinery needed to make game cards, custom printed boxes, etc. We will be ordering the cards, boxes, instructions, and dice from suppliers that we have already lined up.

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