May 2022 State of the Fans

Greetings to all the FanSets faithful.  First off, we want to say we appreciate all of you and FanSets is better because of all of you.  We intend to continue to bring you the highest quality, most detailed and accurate and affordable collectibles possible in the coming years.

However, we have had to make some changes and wanted to let you all know what you will be seeing from us starting June 1st.


Pricing:

Due to increasing manufacturing costs and significantly increased freight shipping rates, the prices of all of our pins that are currently under $17 dollars will increase by $1.00.  Pins and magnets priced at $17 or above will remain the same price.

Shipping:

Due to the rising costs of shipping by the USPS international orders will be losing the flat-rate shipping pricing. We’ve worked for almost the last 6 years to make the shipping and VAT taxes cost low as possible for our international customers and we’ve put this off for as long as possible. Now, international shipping orders will be charged EXACTLY what the USPS charges, with no added fees (Handling).

Microcrew and Microfleet pins:

We know many of you enjoy collecting the many Microcrew and Microfleet pins we have done, assembling your own crews and collections of favorite characters, creatures and ships.  FanSets now has too many of these to keep them all in production on an ongoing basis.  Here is the new format.  We are currently evaluating several voting applications that can be utilized with our website.  Starting in July 2022 we will offer the following voting options open to all of you.  Each quarter will see a mix of 12 Microcrew/Microfleet pins produced.  These will be on a single production run basis and when they sell out, they will be vaulted unless they 1)s ell out extremely quickly and we choose to reorder 2) get voted back into production in the following process.


Voting Process:

In the first month of each quarter (January/April/July/October) starting in July 2022 we will offer a list of 15-25 characters/ships.  You, the customer, will get to vote for your favorite eight.  The eight characters/ships that have the most votes will get produced.  There will also be two write-in slots for characters/ships we might have overlooked on our list.  The two write-ins with the most requests will also get produced.  In the case of a tie, FanSets will have the final say.  The last two spots will be open to any Microcrew/Microfleet pin we have previously produced but are currently out of stock on.

So in summary, each quarter, there will be 8 new Microcrew/Microfleet pins voted on from our list, 2 new Microcrew/Microfleet pins decided by write-in votes and 2 older designs that will be brought back out of the vault!

Voting clarification:

Each voter will get to vote on ONE new character/ship, ONE write-in, and ONE write-in from the Vault. We will take the top eight Characters/Ships, the top two write-ins and the top two write-ins from the vault for a total of twelve pins to produce.


Voting will happen in the first month of the quarter, Design, approval and production will happen in the second and third months of the quarter and the 12 pins will be released, four a month over the next quarter.


IMPORTANT NOTE: FanSets will strive to keep the most popular core of characters in stock a majority of the time and these will not need to be a part of the voting process.  For example, Mr. Spock, Janeway, Kirk, Picard, The TOS Enterprise, The Defiant, etc.  Please watch our blog in the future for a full list.  We will also be releasing redesign of some of our earlier pins as we did with Seven of None, Captain Janeway  and Commander Riker.  A new Captain Picard is being designed now.


We will also commit to doing the core characters from any new show without an initial vote.  We have the Prodigy crew in approval at CBS now and are working on the SNW crew pin designs.


EXAMPLE:

Q3 month 1: Voting

Q3 month2/3 Design/approval/production

Q4 month 1:voting and release of first 4 pins voted for in Q3

Q4 month 2/3: Design/approval/production and release of 8 pins voted for in Q3 (at 4 a month)


Women of Trek:

The Women of Trek line has been extremely popular.  We do not want to discontinue this line but feel like it needs to be expanded.  The format is beautiful and the rest of the Trek universe deserves the same awesome treatment.  We will be renaming this line from “Women of Trek- WOT” to the “Universe of Trek - UOT” It will now include any and all characters of any species/race that make up the wonderfully diverse Universe of Trek that we all know and love.


Special pins and Convention pins:

We will continue to offer these special designs for the shows that we have a booth at.  We will continue to do special anniversary pins and other special designs as we see the need or hear from enough of you that it is something many of you want. For example the rectangular Show logo pins we have done previously and the annual Poker chip pin designs will continue.


XL Ship pins.

Many of you saw the large format hinge ship pin we rolled out at Star Trek Chicago.  The Enterprise 1701-A was a full 6” long and looked like it was ready to fly.  We will be continuing that ship line in that format with the next several ships already in design.


Deltas and Insignias:

You will see a focused effort from us to provide a wide variety of accurate Deltas and other significant insignias in pin and magnet form.  We love these designs and hope that you will all love the accuracy and quality of these pins and magnets as well.


Master Sets:

We lost our Master Set backboard printer to COVID when they went out of business. We have located another printer and are in the process of restocking backer boards for all our existing Master Sets.  Those will be available on the website as they become available. However, we will no longer ship these sets framed.  We are revising pricing to reflect that we will now ship the backerboard and pins only.  You can go to any local hobby or frame shop and purchase a 12x12 shadow box to frame these.  The rate of replacement of broken and damaged frames was too high for us to continue to affordably ship glass frames.  We are convinced UPS was dancing a jig on each package before they delivered it. 

New Master sets will be released at a rate of approximately one a year.  They will no longer be “Anniversary” sets but simply celebratory sets highlighting Star Trek shows and characters we all love.


These sets will also no longer be sequentially numbered but numbered as a limited run.  Rather than 1 of 200, 2 of 200, etc they will be “Limited production run of 200”  Once new sets are designed they will be offered on our website for pre-order.  We will only produce the number of sets pre-ordered plus 10 sets.  The additional 10 sets will be kept by us and used for future giveaways and promotions. So it 123 people pre-order a set, we will produce 133 sets and the y will be labeled as “Limited production run of 133”


We are also currently taking comprehensive inventory and preparing lists of out of stock pins that will be re-ordered and lists of the ones that will become a part of the voting process described above. Please be patient with us as we implement what was described above.  We appreciate your business and the many friendships we have made and are making these changes so that we can be around for years to come.

LLAP,
-Team FanSets