The Fun and Games of Selling Dice

Chel Owens

“I’ve bid on a dice store.”

“Huh?” With the children and the house and life, I usually took a few minutes to get on the same thought train as my husband. Or the same station.

Fortunately, his excitement lent him more patience. “Remember when I told you I was going to bid on a business? Well, there’s this dice store, and it shows good numbers, and…”

The rest of his descriptions and explanations fell into some storage bank of my brain. Profits, programs, websites, and future plans tumbled from him for …days. My prevailing thought? We don’t know the first thing about running an online business.

Dice

Fast-forward nearly a decade later, and I still wonder if I know what I’m doing.

I’ve picked up a few things, sure. I know more about tabletop gaming dice than I thought possible. I have a good rapport with our dice suppliers. I even have a vague idea of why one would want to purchase a ten-sided die.

But some of the lessons I learned along the way were not fun ones to acquire. Like, that an acute color perception ability is mandatory for packing loose dice. WHY would one need acute color perception? Maybe, perhaps, if one sells speckled dice from Koplow Games.

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This is my homemade phone camera picture of the little buggers. Specifically, this is a shot of the speckled d8 (8-sided) dice we sell. The varieties pictured are: Hurricane, Blue Stars, Stealth, Earth, Cobalt, Golden Cobalt, Arctic, Lotus, Fire, Golden Recon, and Ninja. There are 13 more not pictured, if you can believe it: Space, Twilight, Urban, Strawberry, Sea, Air, Granite, Recon, Silver Tetra, Hi Tech, Mercury, Silver Volcano, and Water.

When we purchased the business from a man in Arizona, he generously shipped all the supplies he had. This meant we received large bags of dice. Lots and lots of dice. We set up ‘business’ in our basement. This meant we set up lots and lots of dice in bags all over the shelves and counters in our family room.

This also meant we pawed through said bags -in the basement, in the dark- whenever a customer placed an order.

So… that lovely outside picture I took? Downstairs, it looked more like:

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Would you believe that Hurricane looks just like Golden Cobalt?

 

 

Now would you?

Our setup is much more professional these days. We have shelves with dice drawers. We have a giant desk, a computer and printers, a fancy tape dispenser, and boxes and envelopes. Last Christmas we added gift wrap options.

We have beautiful sets and beautiful pictures.

12mm-antique-silver-metal-dnd-dice-set-square

Most of all, we have lighting. Lots and lots of lighting.

—————-

Now that you know more about dice than you may have wanted to, read what I wrote this past week:
Wednesday, August 28: Ranted about red light rushers in “My Biggest Driving Pet Peeve.”

Thursday, August 29: “The Kirkwood Scott Chronicles: Skelly’s Square,” a book review of Stephen Black‘s cool novel!

Friday, August 30: Winner of the Weekly Terribly Poetry Contest. Congratulations, again, to Gary!

Saturday, August 31: Announced the 41st Weekly Terrible Poetry Contest. The theme is Back to School. PLEASE ENTER!

Sunday, September 1: “The Distant Future?,” in response to Carrot Ranch‘s prompt.

Monday, September 2: An inspirational quote by Abraham Lincoln, Albert Einstein, and Anonymous.

Tuesday, September 3: “Wilhelmina Winters, One Hundred Two.”

Wednesday, September 4: Today.

I also posted all this week at my motherhood site. I wrote “Kids Can Work!,” “It’s My OCD,” and “Where Are My Shoes?”

 

Photo Credit: my crappy phone and my talented husband

 

©2019 Chelsea Owens
Fancy pictures ©2019 Kevin Owens

29 thoughts on “The Fun and Games of Selling Dice”

  9. I enjoyed reading about the dice. I have a collection – various colors, sized, composition, sides as well as some that have other languages on them. I’ve only really ever played with six sided dice. I was watching a show about This Ancient Prince, I think this gent was some sort of a prince since he was buried with quite a bit of grave goods including his own set of dice! In the program they showed at least one die.
    See link:
    https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/mb8bpp/this-ancient-princes-tomb-was-found-between-a-pub-and-a-supermarket “> This Ancient Prince… “Sometime during the late 6th century, an Anglo-Saxon royal was laid to rest in a lavish tomb on the shores of east England.”

    Liked by 1 person

      1. I’ve got a bunch from friends who visited casino’s. Those die have holes put in them so they are recognizable not to be used again at the gambling tables, but to be sold as souvenirs.

        Liked by 1 person

  11. I enjoy pouring out my dice and staring at them–it makes me wonder if that’s how dragons feel with their hordes of jewels 😛

    Also it never occurred to me that you would have the actual product physically there. For whatever reason, I thought you just managed the site and acted as a third party for the product.

    Liked by 1 person

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