In previous posts, I’ve mentioned in passing that my husband and I used to own a hobby game shop. But it’s hard to understate how big an impact this endevour had on our lives. I never could have imagined that my childhood passions of collecting video game memorabilia and making a fan website for my favourite cartoon show would lead anywhere productive. And yet…
Humble beginnings
Back in our teenage years, Ash and I ran a Pokemon card game league at our local library (in fact, that’s how we met!!). I loved to pour my creative energy into thinking up fun and unique activities for the kids to do, and making colourful poster advertisements to attract new players.
At the time, we were active in a LiveJournal group called PKMNCollectors. We soon learned that there was serious money to be made in the business of buying and selling rare Pokemon cards and merchandise, and so each week we began setting up a small sales table at the library.
We then began expanding into other card games, and started selling Yu-Gi-Oh!, Magic: the Gathering, Cardfight!! Vanguard, and Weiss Schwarz products alongside Pokemon. Our next big step was when we became vendors at our local annual pop-culture convention, and later began traveling around Australia to attend bigger events like Supanova and Oz Comic-Con.
Making a living off selling toys and running card game events was starting to look achievable.
The website
The first iteration of BattleAxe was a online store. I created the website only shortly after I’d first published Sora. It was a web shop made with Zen Cart, and in making it I learned a lot about PHP and template includes, which came in handy when I started using WordPress for all my subsequent websites.
Although I basically had no idea what I was doing, I somehow ended up with a functional website through much trial and error.
As things progressed, we became more and more serious about running the business full time, and eventually opened a physical store. The website got a complete overhaul too, and by then I had the skills to make something much more professional. This time it had a responsive layout, so that the site could be viewed properly on any device. I spent lots of time on the category and sub-category menu structure to make sure the navigation was neat, and products were easy to find.
Bricks and mortar
The physical store came to be after Ash found a tiny shop in our small town’s arcade. The rent was cheap enough that even if the business failed, we could cover it with our earnings from our other jobs until the lease ran out. This relatively low risk was a major factor in our decision. So we took a plunge!
Those months we spent organising everything for our opening were some of the most exciting of our lives. We bootstrapped everything, purchasing all our fittings, furniture and shop supplies second hand. We covered the walls with Pokemon posters from our personal collections, and brought our all our stationery and computer gear from home. We even gave up our TV and Nintendo Wii for customers to play in store!
With so little money to invest in stock, we only had two half-full shelving units, a counter display, and a couple of baskets filled with merchandise on opening day. It looked pretty bare, but we could already tell that this was just the beginning of something very special.
Initially, we were worried about being able to generate enough sales with our town’s small population. But with a strong youth demographic, people were pouring in the door, and after school, there was scarcely enough room to fit all our customers!
In fact, we did so well in that initial phase, that we decided to move to a bigger store less than a year later! The new shop was in a much bigger town with an even larger proportion of families and youths who provided most of our business. We continued to grow quickly, investing all our profits back into stock to expand our selection.
I continued making posters and fliers to put up around the town and in mailboxes, as well as for advertising within the store. On busy months with lots of events, I’d sometimes have to make a dozen unique designs. This really pushed my graphic design skills to a new level and I ended up being quite creative with some of them.
The shop had been thriving for about a year in its new location when we were approached by the hobby store chain Good Games for a partnership deal. We decided to get on board, working closely with the owner of the Good Games in our capital city.
As before, our website (and thus my web development skills) grew along with the shop. We moved our catalogue to Shopify to track the stock in both stores, so the site was given yet another overhaul using a completely new system.
We were really living out our dream, working in an industry we felt passionate about, and creating close-knit communities of gamers who weren’t just our customers, but our friends.
However, anyone with their own business knows that the behind scenes work is super grueling. And due to some staffing issues we were starting to get extremely burned out. And so we came to an agreement with our partner, selling our shares to Good Games to cover the investments we made, and deciding to retire from the game shop scene.
We continued to work at both stores for another six months to help with the transition process. I even wrote up some documentation for maintaining the website, which ended up being a template for the same kind of documentation I’ve given to my clients after completing freelance website projects.
It’s been a couple of years since we finished up with our business, and I’m really starting to see how our experience with BattleAxe had given us skills that opened up a lot of great new opportunities for us.
I had always been able to use my creativity to find unique revenue streams for the shop, but soon I found myself noticing them everywhere else, too – I started having a lot of business ideas and that’s when I decided to start my freelance art brand, Bixbite Projects.
Ash remained an official high level judge for Pokemon and Magic events, and now gets flown around the world a few times a year to run international tournaments. He was also able to get a job at another local game shop, and now is able to enjoy the customer-facing roles without managerial burdens!
And of course, through BattleAxe we were able to form an incredible community. We often hear from our old customers telling us how much they enjoyed the time they would spend in our store. And now we’re also seeing how much the kids who would come to our store have grown up! It really was “all about the friends we made along the way”!