PREORDER SECTION CLOSED

JANUARY 2020

After 15 years, we are finally closing the old CPR PREORDER model.  With our new digital suite addition a year and a half ago, our playfield production model completely changed, as well as our ability to resurrect our entire 15-year back-catalog of plastics and backglasses.

Since our playfield runs no longer have to justify large batches of 70-100 playfields (minimum) to be viable, we no longer need to collect preorders for year(s) to amass enough buyers for each title, to make each playfield run viable.  So this process has become obsolete.

At this time, we were down to only a couple CPR Preorder Lists for playfields that have not been run yet.  All others have been run.  We weren’t going to be posting any more new Preorder Inboxes.  So now is the time to put this section of the web site to rest.  We will get to those last ‘Preordered’ runs this year, and email those on the lists when the time comes to ship.  Finishing up the old model once and for all.

So what about all the other playfields we had posted here?   Those were the BOUTIQUE ZONE playfield candidates.  Inboxes open to collect emails from people who wanted to raise their hand and be counted.  Like inboxes for voting.  It allowed us to do headcount(s).  Essentially market research, to see what kind of audience was out there for each playfield we were sitting on usable artwork for.   Please remember:  Boutique Zone Inboxes were NOT Preorder Inboxes.  So those who emailed in for those playfields, regardless of our generic AutoResponse email, were not making any obligation or promise to buy, nor did we infer one.

The moral of the story is, we’re simply going to be making ALL of the Boutique Zone titles now.  This year, 2020.  It no longer matters if 3-4 years of collecting emails yielded 3 people, or 30 people, for each playfield.  Those years of Inboxes proved that virtually none of the Boutique Zone playfields were ever going to be possible under the large-batch / silkscreen model, and the vast majority of the Boutique Zone Inboxes never reached numbers to even consider opening a real Preorder Inbox for those playfield titles.  Good news is, now it doesn’t matter.

So thank you to all who wrote into the Boutique Zone inboxes with your hands raised.  Today, we DO consider the headcounts as valuable information to prioritize the playfields, and assist in the order of production throughout this year.  All the Inbox contents have been kept.  Our few remaining Preorder lists have been kept as well.  But from this point onwards, we will be collecting no more names.

Since we’re doing playfields in groups of 5-10 at a time, and can always come back to repeat a title months later (if sold out)…  we’re simply going to post them directly in the CPR Store, as each playfield batch finishes.  This allows us to release 30-40 different playfield runs, across 2020.   Some will sell a few and a few will remain in stock for months, and some will sell out fast.  IF any sell out, we schedule another batch of 5-10 to be done later.  And so on.   Meaning, if you don’t catch a playfield in our Store the first time, there could always be a second time, and possibly even a third.  Depends on what the market proves it will bear.

So in review… CPR now makes playfields, and buyers buy them off the site when finished.   We make a batch – post them on the site… Make another batch – post them on the site.  And so on.  That easy.  No more lists, no more preorders, no more headcounts required.