Monday, February 27 2023
The release date of the new skeletal frame for Smart Doll is this Friday March 3rd on Mirai's birthday. From 9am-ish JST, all Smart Dolls listed under "Frontline" will be shipped housing the Evolve Frame. Until then, they are all unavailable.
"Frontline" are characters to whom we prioritize availability regardless of sales performance.
Other characters will be gradually awakened from cryosleep based on previous sales. Previously we strived to keep close to 50 Smart Doll characters available at once, but that strategy is not sustainable anymore. We will let characters sell out and prioritize who gets restocked based on sales.
Smart Dolls for official retailers Fabric Friends and Anime Sugoi will ship with the previous frame, and we plan to switch them to Evolve in April.
Many folks have been asking whether the price of Smart Doll would increase. The answer is "No" (for now) which was already answered in the "What is Evolve" article. However, it looks like many folks (who didn't read the article) were expecting a price hike, so I will gladly meet the expectation if folks continue to ask ;-)
I also published the Changelog on the Smart Doll online store, outlining the continuous improvements to the Evolve skeletal frame. Evolve employs a versioning system commonly used in software development known as Semantic Versioning, which I adopted due to my background in software development.
This versioning system and changelog will provide transparency into our product development.
The remaining product bodies that house the previous frame will be sold in the chaos section, but only for folks who purchased Option Heads. We keep some of the previous frames for customer replacements and sell the rest in the chaos section. The chaos section is not just for outlet but also for product quality items.
We plan to sell Evolve frames standalone, but it won't be for a while as the girls in cryosleep are getting restless - we want to look after them first.
Photos in this post were taken early last year in Kumamoto Japan. Nexus manages mold engineering and injection molding for us. The black bear is Kumamon - the mascot of the Kumamoto prefecture. #smartdoll