Why did you have a massive clearance? Where have all the products gone? Are you shutting down? All your questions answered and more in this special update from The Toku Source owner, Jeremy.
Things may have been a little scary for those of you out there that are fans of The Toku Source in the last few months. Between a massive clearance sale and selling off some of our storage items, it may have seemed that the end is nigh for us. Allow me to assure you, we’re not going anywhere!
That said, this is a huge period of transition for my business and for me personally. Between the pandemic and the cost of living crisis, we just weren’t getting as much out of comic cons and events as in the past. While initially, I had decided that we’d take a break from trading at these events, I’ve not decided that The Toku Source won’t be trading at conventions going forward. There may be the odd event that we decide to take part in, should the mood take me, but as a general rule that part of our offer is completed. With this in mind, I don’t need to be carrying anywhere near the amount of stock that I had sustained during the first seven or so years, where the summer season would see a convention every other week. This was the first reason for the big clearance sale.
Clearing out some stock also had to happen for some more personal reasons. The Toku Source is now and always has been run in the main by one person, me, operating out of my house. Despite the support of my wife allowing me to fill our property with each and every random tokusatsu item you could ever want (not no mention my own personal collection), enough has become enough and this needs to be a house again. Further to this, we are preparing to put our house on the market and move. This has accelerated the need to ‘declutter’ and open up space, and this is why any stock that survived the clearance has now been taken from sale and put into storage. What remained after the sale will return but I don’t want to put a timescale on that. Once we’re moved, settled and happy, I can spend some time dealing with that.
So, what does this mean for stock going forwards? In a nutshell, I can’t store very much here for a while. New items, such as Kamen Rider Gavv coming up in a few weeks, the last quarter or Boonboomger and more will be available via preorder only. I’ll be importing exactly as many as has been ordered by you, the customers, and no more. I will try to improve the time between preorders opening and closing, as that has been a bit of a struggle this past year, to allow more time for you to stagger orders, await payday and those important things we all try to juggle in sustaining our hobby. Also, if there’s something you’re looking for that hasn’t appeared via preorder, I’m happy to order it in specially for you. All you need do is drop me a message.
Something I’m incredibly proud of and seeking to grow even further in the coming months is the content side of The Toku Source. I have a wonderful group of freelance writers submitting excellent tokusatsu articles, reviews and opinion pieces and giving them this outlet to share their love of this genre is a top priority of this new-ish direction of The Toku Source. I also have one wonderful content creator making videos for YouTube (don’t tell him I called him wonderful) and video content is a long neglected aspect of this business that I’d keen to expand. We have a Power Rangers Hyperforce style TTRPG series coming up, chaired by one of our freelancers, and hopefully a lot more coming in the future.
To tl;dr this announcement, then:
- We’re not going anywhere
- Stock won’t be hanging around here for you to buy, you have to preorder it
- Freelance writers continue to thrive, please read their work
- More content coming soon.
If you have any other questions, you can drop a comment below, reach out to The Toku Source social media or DM me personally on my Facebook, Twitter, Bluesky or whatever, at @JEZxEVERYTHING.
