Reflections on the Past and Visions of the Future

Hello and Welcome!

We hope that everyone has been having a wonderful time with friends and family (human, animal, and otherwise!) this holiday season and have had time to decompress and recharge! We know we have!

We wanted to take this opportunity to reflect a bit on this past year and look to the future for what we aim to do in 2025.

It has been quite a busy year for us. Some things to highlight:

• We launched this website (mitznsimz.com)! This was one of our main achievements this year and one of our key objectives for 2024 to help us in our expansion. We are proud of what we have done and the different partners we worked with in getting this done. It was a bit of an adventure, but we got their in the end and I think we are working on our plans to grow further. We have even cross a threshold of 100 orders so far this year. This is an exciting milestone to reach and we are looking to keep this growing! And of course we are super grateful to all of our customers!
• As far as expansion is concerned, we have expanded our fleet of printers to 2 Elegoo Saturn 3 Ultra's and one Elegoo Saturn 2 Ultra. We retired the Elegoo Mars 3 Pro. This is helping us to print more efficiently (improved speed and build volume) while also enhancing print quality (higher resolution).
• We have caught up on our item backlog. In the web shop we caught up on most of the backlog of items for the artists we have previously supported so our library is packed with many more great models to pick from! And as such, we have a pretty good rhythm and process now to keep the web site library maintained each month in a timely manner as we get new models constantly from our amazing artists.
• We added a few artists to our library! We are happy to have brought on the models from Monster Atlas, Spicy Arts, and Galaad Miniatures. We feel that they complement and extend our miniature offering quite well.
• On our Etsy shop we reached a milestone of 4500 total sales (just a few shy of 5000 in fact! This is such a great thing to have reached and it seemed like such an impossible goal when we first started this adventure back in 2023. But we are again so appreciative of all of our customers.
• To expand our customer reach we have also now gone International with both Etsy and the Web site. We are super happy for all of our international customers and we hope to continue to expand our global reach. And to comment on our European customers, please rest assured that we are IOSS certified through the support of an official partner to give the best and correct tax compliance required which also keeps costs at the lowest level they can be, smooth the export process as much as possible, and be fully compliant with the different laws (thanks ***XIT ...) required. So you can shop with us with confidence and transparency.
• We have expanded our reach on social media a little and as always we are always so thankful for any new followers and all the lovely reviews from everyone as well as any pictures of painted minis or minis is action. Its always great to share the masterpieces!
• Many customers have reached out and gotten to know us more and we love that. We love to interact and get to know our customers to so please do not be shy and reach out on any of the platforms!
• Our newest expansion right at the end of the year is that we have invested in our first FDM printer. We are still learning this craft at the moment more on this below but suffice to say, if 3D Resin printing is for Sorcerers, then 3D FDM printing is for Artificers. so seems like we are now multiclassing as a Sorcerer-Artificer. :-)
• And a lot more, but these are the main highlights. Overall it has been a wonderful year and we wish to extend our heartfelt thanks to all of our customers!

So, what do we have in store for 2025? Well, here are some of the things we have planned in our workshop:

• We want to get more visits to the site. Maybe this means doing ads. Maybe it means doing some fancier edits on the product listings. Probably its also reaching out more in the different online communities to get our name out there. But this is an area we want to focus on as the web site is more profitable than Etsy and it gives us more control and flexibility. 
• Since Etsy was just mentioned, then it is worth to mention the plan for Etsy. This is a tricky one to be honest. What is certain is that we want to keep it going. Majority of our traffic is still on Etsy and to be fair, it is great for helping new customers find us. And some users prefer this platform which is fine. And because Etsy is more expensive, the prices there will be more than on the web site. But we've not been adding new items to Etsy for a while and now we are not sure of what to do - add them or not. We suppose this will depend if we can increase traffic over to the web site or not fast enough. This is a question mark.
• FDM. This is I think one of the items we are most excited for to expand. Right now we are looking to add larger terrain pieces to our library as well as other play sets to really bring a new dimension of play to our customers. This will take some time to fully level-up our new Artificer sub-class but we are hoping that it will bring new and exciting options for our customers. 
• We have one artist that we intend to catch-up on their backlog (Galaad Miniatures) in the year so be on the lookout for an expansion of their items. And we are looking forward to test the terrain pieces from DM Stash as well as the play environments from Novaminis as our FDM journey progresses.  And there may be more new terrain specific artists once FDM gets in full swing, so let's see how this new and exciting path takes us!
• PayPal is something we are trying to sort out. We'll spare you the details but it has been a little bit of a pain truth be told but hopefully this will stabilise in the New Year.
• Contests - finally I think it will be close to time to start considering this in the new year as we hopefully get more of a social following and reach and this may or may not be linked to the FRM journey as well.   
• Mystery Boxes have been a bit of a hit for the few customers that have purchased them already. And we have to admit they are a bit of fun for us too. And I'll comment a secret here that we tend to add a few more items into the boxes than what is added to the listing. So be brave - we are pretty sure you won't be disappointed.
• While not a mystery box, but another type of Bundle we want to explore are Campaign focused Bundles. Basically, the idea is to put some Bundles together that has all the items needed for a campaign chapter (models by the same artist if possible!) and bundle them together as a cost saving bundle. 
• Videos - ooof, this is still a challenge for us to add product videos to our listings to show the actual default size of models, but let's see how this goes.
• Status Indicators. This is something brand new we are working on in the background. We'll just leave this little tease here for the moment but hope to comment on this soon!
• And probably a lot more but these are our main objectives!

All of this future stuff boils down to time. So will try to focus time but this is not always easy. But if there is anyone out there who would be interested to help in someway or to otherwise explore if any kind of partnership could be reached, by all means reach out! We are happy to engage and discuss / explore options!

So in reflection, 2024 was a busy year and a successful one and as previously stated, we are so thankful for all of our customers. And looking to 2025, we feel like we have some ambitious goals but we think we can work hard towards them and make good progress. 

What is for sure is that we want to continue to bring great models by our amazing artists to you and provide our excellent customer service - that final part is what we do like to pride ourselves on - its important to give that personal touch to our customers.

In closing, we wish everyone a wonderful continued holiday season with continued wonderful festivities (maybe some good rolls if you manage to have time!) and of course, all the best for 2025 with good health and prosperity for everyone! Wishing you all and yours love, peace, and happiness from our team here!

Oh and Mitz & Simz separately want to add - Meow Meow Meow, Purr Purr Purr - bless them they are such sweet jokesters! 

Thank you all again and see you for many more great things in 2025!

Happy continued gaming and painting!

-Pete and the whole Mitz & Simz Gang (Sharron, Mitz & Simz)