A cool dice bag with spiderweb design in gray and silver

I’ve recently been thrown into the deep end of the world of dice bags while working on the dice store. As a gamer myself, I’m very familiar with the awesomeness of dice and the variety of dice available out there. What I was apparently insufficiently educated about is the incredible selection of dice bags that are available as well.

Don’t get me wrong, I always knew there was a good dice bag selection. In my mind, though, dice bags fell into one of a couple categories: there are the super cheap crappy dice bags that can hold one little set of dice and you’re done. Then there’s the velour dice bags that are your more or less standard variety, which are good for several sets of dice. Historically this is what I’ve usually used. Then at the upper end there’s the leather or fake leather dice bags for the true dice fans who want only the best storage for their dice.

Aside from these basics, the only other kind of dice bag I was really aware of was the chain mail dice bag. Boy oh boy is there a lot more.

In fact, the variety of dice bags is nearly as staggering as the variety of dice. The key to it is that plenty of companies manufacture dice bags with designs printed on the fabric of the bag itself, which opens up a world of possibility: dice bags with spiderwebs printed across it, ones with designs and logos, blood splatters, just about anything really. Heck, I even found a dice bag that was actually a cthulhu plush, specifically for holding your Call of Cthulhu dice.

How Much is Too Much

Did you see that subtitle? Awesome right? It makes things easier to read by breaking up the wall of text. I’m working on doing that more.

But the point here is that I was reading some research that talked about how giving consumers too many options put them in a kind of analysis paralysis where it actually became harder and harder to make a decision. It is, apparently, much easier to choose between two dice bags than it is to choose between a hundred dice bags.

The implication here is that if you’re running a place where people buy dice online, and dice bags too, then carrying too many dice bags could actually reduce your dice bag sales. Too few though, and people feel like there’s not enough selection, or they don’t find something they’re excited about. Like Goldilocks, there’s some magical middle number.

I’m not too worried about this on the dice bag front though — my bigger concern is the dice themselves. We got a pretty broad selection of dice right now, and the plan was always to grow that selection as the store grows, with an ultimate goal of having just about everything. The idea of being some super complete one-stop-shop for every kind of dice imaginable is compelling, but according to the research that might actually hurt the performance. In my mind that would be a huge draw — people would know that they can get any kind of dice at the store, so they’d be more likely to return, more likely to find just the right dice, and more likely to spread the word. Now I’m worried that I may have to revise that “carry it all!” mentality.

Of course, it’d be foolish to make that kind of decision off of ready just one study. Probably more testing is needed, and more reading. Happily (or maybe not happily) it’s going to be a while before I have the option to carry every kind of dice anyway.

And of course even if the labels aren’t Avery Dennison labels, they’ll still say what Avery number equivalent they are. Even the Microsoft Word template wizard has all the Avery numbers preset in it. They’re a big deal.

In point of fact, they’re a fortune 500 company making over 6 billion with a B dollars in sales each year. And in the course of researching them I learned that those labels and tag attachers are both small parts of their business. Apparently — at least according to Wikipedia, which I’ve no reason to doubt — over 50% of their business comes from their Pressure-Sensitive Materials segment. This includes, and I quote: “pressure-sensitive roll-label materials, films for graphic applications, relfective highway-safety products, performance polymers, and extruded films.”

And I have to admit that after reading that, I have no idea at all exactly what that segment does. Reflective film for highway safety seems to me to mean reflective tape. I’m sure how that’s pressure sensitive though, so perhaps it’s something similar but different.

At any rate, the interesting thing (and Wikipedia is awesome to already have this) is that Avery Dennison has apparently sold their Office and Consumer Products segment to 3M. This means those labels and all the other office products they make (and they make a bunch) is being sold off. The surprising thing to me is that it’s being sold for $550 million, which seems really low. I mean, don’t get me wrong, 500 million dollars is a lot of money, but for a giant division of a fortune 500 company making over 6 billion a year, it seems like a comparatively low price to sell off such a huge division — especially when it’s a division with so much brand recognition for Avery Dennison.

It was so intriguing in fact that I almost did some more research to find out more information about the deal. But then I discovered that I wasn’t quite that interested.

I recently encountered the most frustrating technical jargon response. Two of the major machines used in CNC machining are CNC routers and CNC mills. I wanted to know what the difference between them was, so I asked a client. I first got an unrelated history lesson of machining and finally got down to the answer. Guess what? The difference is what they’re being used for. If you’re machining word, it’s a CNC router. If you’re machining metal, it’s a CNC mill. But you use the same damned machine to do both.

Why the heck would you have two different names for the same frickin machine? It’s like they’re trying to confuse us outsiders.

Just think of all the cool statues you could make — a new one every evening. Dragons and castles or — ooh — make a bunch of ninja statues out of whatever stone is cheapest and hide them all over the yard. Yeah, I could live with that. Screw garden gnomes, I want garden ninjas.

Aluminum aside they also make all manner of plastic molded cases, and a chunk of those are actually waterproof cases. One of the interesting things about working with an actually consumer-oriented client is that suddenly I’m working with products that I actually want! Sometimes it’s just cool black diamond hatch design aluminum storage cases that look like they could have a rimbaldi device inside. I don’t really have any use for it, it’s just cool. The cases even come with that cutout foam.

But sometimes I even have practical thoughts for it — specifically using the cases for photography equipment. I do a chunk of photography, including the kind that requires me to cart around giant lights and tripods and stuff. Right now I have a fairly crummy soft-sided case that the lights more or less fit into with much bulging. But if I could have a couple of their big ol’ plastic or aluminum cases with the EVA foam inserts I could cut out exactly the shape that I need to cradle the ridiculously expensive lights and their fragile bulbs (and those bulbs are $35 a pop too).

Or even better, I could get one of the really big aluminum cases on wheels — they’re typically sold as trade show cases or product cases — and I could just wheel those lights around, because they are heavey. I could also, of course, make wee cutouts for the tripods and clamps and other junk that I need. The best part of it is that I would no longer be wrestling with the laws of physics trying to get everything to fit inside the damned case. Just plunk it into the hole in the foam and snap the latches shut, then take off.

Yup, I can see that looking through these cases every day could be an issue!

The basic idea of the infographic is that you present a whole bunch of factoids in an interesting and graphical way. These factoids are supposed to be the kind of thing that people find interesting and make them go “hmm.” For example, with the metal stamping industry one of the things I learned while researching was that it ships about 11 billion dollars of product domestically. By itself this is a big but not terribly interesting fact about stainless steel metal stamping. But we can then compare that number against other well-known industries. Specifically we can look at the music industry at 4.4 billion, or the movie industry at 8 billion — next to those you’re suddenly surprised at how huge this metal stamping thing is and how you’ve never heard of it (all that info comes from the census bureau by the way, from their 2007 update).

This is of course just one little factoid that’s going on the infographic. As you can imagine the goal of the metal stamping industry infographic is to inform about the industry and about stainless steel stamping, and not to promote a particular viewpoint or to persuade (which is another common use of infographics — sadly those ones are usually filled with pretty biased, misleading and even outright incorrect facts).

I like working on these kinds of projects, which are far more interesting than press releases and updating copy and sell sheets. It’s fun putting projects like this together, and then work on how to promote them.

Not to be sure part of this is very likely that it’s much harder to find pink dice at your typical gaming stores, online or otherwise. If you want black dice, anyplace that carries dice is going to be able to take care of you. But if you’re on the lookout for pint dice you’re going to be a little SOL at the majority of game or dice shops.

It’s still a little curious to me that there are that many gamers who are determined to buy pink dice — most gamers tend more toward the direction of looking at all the dice on the shelf and then picking whichever they think is coolest.

Back in the day when my gaming group gamed a lot more often, my sister once bought me a set of pink dice as a fake gift for some occasion or the other. This dice set got way more use than she ever imagined. We kept the pink dice set on hand in the gaming room, and any time a gamer forgot their dice (which happened fairly often) and needed to borrow dice, they had to use the pink dice. This was sufficiently shameful that it actually radically reduced how often people forgot their dice.

Not that there’s anything wrong with pink dice, regardless of the gender of the player, and I think the surprisingly large search volume of people wanting to buy pink dice goes to show that plenty of people want to play with pink dice. But at least in my experience, the pink dice are useful even if you don’t want to play with them. Perhaps especially then.

I remember being really into Dungeons & Dragons before I ever played it — before, in fact, I really knew entirely what is was. I have no idea where I first heard of D&D or what attracted me to the name, but when I was in junior high my brother and I decided that we wanted to play. We went to the local B. Dalton book store and looked through their two shelved filled with Dungeons & Dragons books. At the time, that seemed like so many.

I remember most of the books were Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, and we certainly didn’t feel we were ready for advanced yet, so we finally found a boxed set that was just labeled Dungeons & Dragons — Hollow World. It said it had everything you needed to play in Hollow World.

Of course anyone at all familiar with D&D knows all the mistakes that happened here. Hollow World was just a setting, and it did not have everything you needed, because at the very least you needed the player’s handbook and some dice to play the game at all, and preferably the DMG as well (since that’s where all the magic items were). Nevertheless, we poured over that Hollow World boxed set and tried as hard as we could to deconstruct the rules based off of the references. Since they introduced some new races (and we thought it was weird that there were no dwarves or elves or humans in D&D, but oh well) we were able to get a decent feel for the character creation process. Of course the only dice we had were the old d6s from board games, but somehow we managed (though it was very clear from the rule that we were supposed to have special D&D dice).

In the end what we played was not Dungeons & Dragons by the rules — not at all. But it was a fantasy RPG. We played, and when we played it was mostly roleplaying and not much combat, which we didn’t really understand that well from the rules.

I do recall that at some point my brother discovered a store that was still not really a game store, but it had a lot more gaming stuff in it — including the all important Dungeons & Dragons dice. So at long last we had those strange and wonderful dice in our hands to do our gaming with — in particular the d20, which at the time was the talisman of D&D to me.

Of course I still game today, though I almost never play Dungeons & Dragons. But the look and feel of those D&D dice is still somehow magical and wonderful.

Their actual industry, custom open die forgings, isn’t terribly interesting as these things go. Forging is an industrial industry, and none of the industrial manufacturers are super interesting from a business standpoint. In fact pretty much across the board the consumer manufacturers and resellers are the more interesting product lines to talk about.

But the nice thing about custom forgings is that it’s not a very competitive industry. There might be a lot of forges out there, but it’s nothing compared to, say, jewelry shops or plumbers. Not only that but these guys have a very specific niche within the custom forging industry: they aren’t huge and they don’t try to compete on price at all. In fact they openly acknowledge that for many types of custom forgings they’re more expensive. However, what they have is very fast turnaround times.

In the forging industry, a chunk of the business is crankshafts. Not just making crankshafts for new things, but making crankshaft to replace old ones that have died. And most forged crankshaft manufacturers have really long lead times. When you have some giant industrial press that’s shut down because the crankshaft went out, you care a lot more about lead time than price, especially when the difference is often a couple weeks vs a few months.

So we have a nice client with an uninteresting industry, but a low competition one and a very specific niche that even fewer people try to compete for. It means making progress in promoting the company is easier, and the process is pleasant.

What happens is this: I decide to do my shopping early and online, and I even go so far as to look online and find gifts. But usually I’m vacillating between a couple of possible gift ideas for one person and let it sit for a few days while I decide which to get. Then a few days turns into a week or two and I suddenly realize that while I still have some time before Christmas, I’ve passed the line where I can no longer order online and expect to get it shipped in time.

Suddenly I have to do shopping the old fashioned way — again. And that means I have to wait for a weekend when I have some time to go out, and suddenly it’s a couple days before Christmas, I finally have a day off of work, and I’m desperately looking for whatever’s in stock.

Oh, and I should mention that it sucks to shop that late because it’s so late and you absolutely must get something right now. On the other hand, the stores are not crowded at all. It’s actually kind of pleasant, other than the pressure. There’s only so much shopping you can fit in the day, and if you don’t find something you can’t just go somewhere else.

So this year, I’ve still got some time. I’m totally going to buy online for everyone, or almost everyone. If I’m not sure which of two things to get I’m going to make like it’s Christmas Eve and I have no choice but to buy one of them now.

Of course I’ve said all that before, so we’ll see.