047 – Setting up your small business & painting miniatures with Andrea of Wolfwood Gaming

Courtney: 4:26

Today I am joined by the managing partner and mini painter for Wolfwood Gaming, Andrea Canerossi, Andrea, how are you today?

Andrea: 4:38

Good morning. I’m doing well, Courtney, how are you?

Courtney: 4:41

I’m great. You know, it is a pretty chill Friday morning. I’m just enjoying having some coffee and was playing with Bowser a little bit earlier. So that’s always fun. Bowser’s my dog.

Andrea: 4:53

That’s awesome.

Courtney: 4:54

Let us start things off, and I would love to know a little bit about you and how you got into gaming.

Andrea: 5:00

Well, so I’ve been gaming, Courtney for about 15 ,years, actually. It was the first date of my now husband. He invited me to come play with him and his friends, handed me a character sheet and said, prepare to math. Which is not my favorite, but you know, we were playing a second edition game and yeah, I got hooked especially with the storytelling and I’ve been gaming ever since My husband and I have been fostering for about five years now. And we’ve been using it with our foster kids and the foster community. And it’s just become kind of like a lifestyle for us, and that’s kind of also how I got into mini painting as well. So that’s kinda my gaming story there is: fell in love with it as part of, you know, dating my husband, and now it’s something we do as a family.

Courtney: 5:54

Okay. That is really cool, and I want to dig into using it with the foster children. How did that start?

Andrea: 6:04

I’ll go ahead and say that I’ve got four kids now. Two are my biological children and we started gaming with them first. And then when we started fostering and we ended up adopting two of our fosters, thus bringing us to four kids: ages from seven to 12. So we are kind of the elementary school bus. You know, what we decided was that this was a way for our fosters to feel kind of part of the family. Cause it’s something we were already doing with our boys and it was also a way for them to pretend to be somebody else. They could be brave; they could be wizards; they could be super powerful, and for fosters, that’s, you know, they’re in a world where they’ve come from potentially some not great backgrounds, a lot of upheaval in their life. They’re very powerless. They’re told where to go and what to do and for them, this is a way for them to get into a world where they can cast fireball, and it was also a way for us to start seeing their personalities come out in their characters and get to know them. You know, we learn their favorite colors based off of what dice they wanted to use. We found out, like my daughter that we adopted she is a chaotic little Druid in a very small package and it was awesome to watch her get comfortable with herself and watch her wreak havoc across the battlefield, on the map and then turn around and bring that kind of same energy after a while to the house and playing with her siblings and getting comfortable with us. So, you know, for us, it’s been a way to get to know the kids, make them feel a part of something bigger. Cause they’re part of the party, and also make them feel like they belong and we’ve kept it up. And while we’re not fostering right now we’re really focused on two of our kids right now who are going through some health issues. It’s something that we do with the larger foster community and host games for other foster families as well.

Courtney: 8:22

That is absolutely amazing. Like how often are you playing with your, I guess just your family versus how often are you doing the larger community?

Andrea: 8:32

So I would say the larger community is hit or miss. We live in the south and so COVID numbers over the winter were heinously high. Right. So we didn’t do anything over the winter. A lot of times what we find is with kids coming in and out of households, there’s a lot of, of the COVID getting passed around, and so we didn’t do it over the winter. But before that, we would do them once, every couple of months for families that were interested. But with our family, we probably play two to three games a week. So my husband runs a game for the kids. I run a game for the kids and then our two older boys run a game and my husband and the rest of us come in and out as we have time and energy. So it’s cool to watch my 12 and 11 year old kind of, you know, stretch their wings and try to be the DM. It’s bonding time with Dad.

Courtney: 9:27

That is super cool. Yeah, it makes sense that obviously COVID would have impacted how much you could do it on the larger scale. Well, I mean, honestly, I could keep asking questions about this for awhile, but you’ve mentioned that this was kind of how you also got into miniature painting. So I would love to dive into that. What’s the story behind the minis?

Andrea: 9:49

Right. So I’ve been painting now for probably two years. I think, but anyway, it was right at the beginning of the pandemic, and I still was working for a global IT firm. I was in associate partner in charge of a hundred million dollar portfolio, 200 plus people department. And then all of a sudden, all four of my kids were home being remote schooled and everything, and it was super stressful and I needed an outlet and painting became it. It was the only way that I could kind of turn my brain off, you know? Cause when you’re focused on painting something so tiny, you can’t really think about anything else. After a while I started posting pictures of it to social media, you know, my Facebook page and my coworkers were like, oh my gosh, would you paint for us? And I was like, sure. And then it just kind of evolved from there into a “wow. Could I actually make money doing this?” Like not as much money as working at a full-time job, but could I make some money and yeah, so that kind of evolved to that and started the juices flowing on “maybe I could make this a side hustle,” and that’s kind of what led to Wolfwood Gaming as well. So that’s where I started.

Courtney: 11:09

Yeah, I love so much when it starts as something that you just want to try it out and have fun. And then other people are like, whoa, that’s really cool. I want that.

Andrea: 11:19

Yeah, it was definitely a shock to my system. The first time one of my coworkers was like, I will pay you to paint my minis. And I was like, really? Okay.

Courtney: 11:29

How many minis did they want you to paint?

Andrea: 11:32

Well, that one was actually a custom order. And he wanted me to, since I have a 3d printer scale up a big wonder woman miniature, he had found on my mini factory and paint it for his wife.

Courtney: 11:44

Oh, cool!

Andrea: 11:44

So it was. the biggest mini I’ve painted to date. And it was the very first one I painted for sale. So it was kind of like, okay, I don’t know if I’m ready to do that. But after that came a few of the normal 32 ones, and those were a lot more manageable.

Courtney: 12:00

So tell me about, for any of our listeners that aren’t aware of your shop: what is Wolfwood Gaming? Like what all do y’all offer? And I guess let’s go into a little bit about your partnership.

Andrea: 12:11

Okay, sounds good. So Wolfwood Gaming is a veteran and woman owned business. The veteran is my business partner and our creative director, Deacon Wolfwood, and then myself, Andrea as well. I manage the business from a business perspective, the social media and do the mini painting. And what we offer is quality affordable tabletop gear. And what do I mean by that? Well, we believe in accessibility, Deacon and I both have had long talks about this and we want everyone to be able to have something at their table that is special. And so we offer tabletop gear across a variety of price points, and that goes as low as like $8 all the way up to some of our more products as well. And the products that we offer are dice trays. What the dice trays are, they’re wooden framed. And we either have a cloth bottom that is padded for say, like gemstone dice, or we also have dice rolling surfaces in the trays that are super pretty, but they make that awesome click clack noise right? And then we have painted minis. We have dice bag charms, which can be put on key chains, purses, gaming bags, dice bags. So they can be customized to match either a character or a theme just to add a little bling to a bag and make it kind of like, oh, something small. They’re great for gifts: for you know, the DM or the entire group at the end of a campaign or at holidays. We also do different displays for dice. Deacon and I are unapologetic dice collectors. We love the little math rocks and what better way than to display them in dice display potions? I paint minis and create little scenes that dice can be added to. So all of that’s what we have in the shop right now, along with some you know, very inexpensive tabletop geared kind of printables as well, like a daily quest log, which is basically a to-do list.

Courtney: 14:23

Y’all have such a cool variety. I really enjoyed kind of browsing through your Etsy store. How did y’all get connected? Like how did Wolfwood Gaming come to exist?

Andrea: 14:35

So I was very blessed to work with Deacon at our old job. And then when our paths split from a job perspective, right at the beginning of the pandemic, we kept up the friendship and, you know, after a while it was kind of like, Hey, Deacon was like, I’ve got these trays that I’d like to sell. I’m like over here going well, people are paying me to paint minis. And so we decided to go into business together and really, truly the, the vision for it has evolved, thanks to, to Deacon. And then from a creative perspective, all the lines of offerings that we have in the shop. Those are, you know, Deacon’s ideas. And then behind that comes me with you know, my program management background from the IT company that I was working for, and so I manage all the finances and it’s a really good balance between Deacon and I to build this business. Which is great because being a small business owner is a lot of work.

Courtney: 15:36

Yes, it is. So I guess I want to dive into a little bit more of how y’all decided how to, I mean, other than the, you’re the one that’s painting the managers and Deacon is trays. How did you decide how to split up the business responsibilites?

Andrea: 15:54

We really try to lean into each other’s strengths, Courtney, and you know, if someone else is looking at doing a business, that’s kind of what I would recommend as well. Deacon is very outgoing, so he handles a lot of the local going out to shops and promoing things locally where we are here in Alabama, and then he handles a lot of the research as well into the creative side of things. He goes out and looks at what, what is the market interested in? I’ll get texts from it and it’ll be like, look at this cool thing. We could do something like this. And I’m like, okay. Yeah, you’re right, we could. And then you know, I’m used to managing large portfolios, revenue, profit, et cetera. So I, it just naturally fell to me to kind of handle that side of the business.

Courtney: 16:43

Yeah, that makes sense. I’m a project manager, so even when I was kind of starting up with some of the Lightheart stuff, it was like, well, I know how to make a schedule and get people to follow through on things.

Andrea: 16:54

Right, exactly. And that that’s basically, you know, we play to our strengths.

Courtney: 16:58

What were the first steps? So you guys decided that, Hey, we could actually make a store together and make this work. What did you do then?

Andrea: 17:09

We had to make it really official. We went ahead and decided to incorporate into an LLC. Limited liability company for those not familiar with the term. And that meant registering as an official business in partnership with the IRS and getting what’s known as an EIN number. and that number is, you know, specific to the business and used on all things like tax forms and stuff. And the idea behind that was to give Deacon and I some coverage as a company, so that if there were issues, you know, it protected both of us as individuals and our, our individual bank accounts. Which is one of the things that, you know, if somebody else were looking at doing a small business, I would recommend you can register your business for free with the IRS. Or you can get something like legal zoom to do all of it, and your startup costs, if you do that, will be probably anywhere between 250 to 500. At the time, you know, I had a 70 hour week job plus the kids, so I took the legal zoom route; Courtney, looking back if I could go back, I’d probably change that just to save on some startup costs, but that was the real push to go pass the inertia of just, we have this great idea to making it real. And then from there it was deciding, okay, what’s going to be our first line of stock? You know, are we going to just stay focused on dice trays and minis? Are we going to do something else? And then also what platform are we going to use to, to sell on? And so that was really the nucleus of, of starting that business back in December of 2020.

Courtney: 18:49

Okay, what made you decide on Etsy?

Andrea: 18:52

So we actually didn’t move to Etsy until August of last year, we try to run our own website based off of WooCommerce and a WordPress site. And Deacon is a UI web designer and he did a great job really designing a website that was unique and very much on brand for us. But unfortunately the backend, the commerce side of it, we just could not get those commerce plugins to work consistently. And it meant we were losing sales because people would go to checkout and then the checkout process would mess up. Usually with the shipping, it was always the shipping. And after a while, we started gaining a lot of traction on social media, but we weren’t translating that into sales. We decided to move over to Etsy. Just simply because it’s a known platform, it’s a known marketplace and it took the stress of managing those commerce pieces out of it. And from there we really saw, sales increase by leaps and bounds because people weren’t abandoning things in their cart. You know, they weren’t having issues with the website. Like it or not, Etsy was driving traffic to us. There were some hidden fees that we didn’t know about until afterwards, but, overall the move to Etsy was good for us. Now that we’re well-established, have almost a hundred sales in Etsy and they’re raising their fees, we are looking at expanding into a Shopify account, and actually running both Etsy and Shopify at the same time.

Courtney: 20:41

That is interesting that you kind of have had to go back and forth. It’s very unfortunate that you’ve had those issues with the plugins right at the beginning, but I think that it does make a lot of sense to once you are like more comfortable and more established to have both an Etsy stop and a website where you’re not having to pay all of the Etsy fees, but you’re still able to get that Etsy traffic that isn’t coming from your normal social media.

Andrea: 21:09

Exactly.

Courtney: 21:10

Cool. So what I would love to dive into next is the, I guess, overall design process. So obviously you and Deacon are making different items, but is there any kind of collaboration on themes or how do you decide on what a new type of product offering is going to be

Andrea: 21:29

So Deacon and I have a real problem with Pinterest. And we’re constantly sending things back and forth over Facebook messenger to each other, and it’s like, look at this, we could make this into something that’s game-related and, you know, it’s things like watching acrylic art paint videos, and the way that the colors are mixing is kinda like that would make a great resin dice tray to do something similar. I also have an entire board on Pinterest associated with character art, and that becomes the basis for a lot of the color schemes for my minis that I put up in the shop. And Deacon will send me other things as well, ideas, you know, and so back and forth, we’d go and have these kind of collaborative sessions. And then once we talk through the creative side of it, then we kind of turned to the business side. Okay. How much is it gonna take to make this; what’s kind of the profit margin we want to have? Right, because for Deacon in particular, this is one of his ways of bringing in an additional stream of income, and now that I’ve left my job, it’s mine as well. So this is how we pay the bills. So it’s like, how do we balance profit margin with also staying in line with our kind of creed, right? Affordable quality materials that you can have for your gaming space. And so that’s kind of where our creative process is, is let’s look at these colors, let’s look at these ideas. We don’t see this really on the market, but we can translate something else into that. And then is it a viable business product? I mean, we have shelved some ideas where we’re like the profit margin’s not gonna work Especially with Etsy fees, and it’s just not worth it to have something that’s only going to bring us a buck or two. So that’s kind of our process, Courtney.

Courtney: 23:30

Yeah, that makes sense. I am also a huge Pinterest fan, so I appreciate that that helps give y’all some inspiration. So I guess I would love to know about the evolution of the products was kind of a follow-up to that. I know it started with miniatures and trays on Deacon’s part, but at what point did you decide to add other products?

Andrea: 23:52

So we actually started adding new products, like the dice bag charms pretty quickly, when we realized that the more successful businesses in our space had a variety of price points. And so that’s where things like the dice bag charms came from. What we were seeing was people were selling dice bags, and some of those dice bags came with already attached dice bag charms, but we didn’t really see anywhere else on the market: removable ones, let alone customizable ones. And I’m one of those nerds who has Yeah, I’m one of those people. I have my own dice per character. And so each character has a dice bag. So I was like, well, I want to charm on each of those dice bags, maybe other people would, and it’s been a best seller, I would say, honestly, because of the price point, and it’s something that was new and it’s something that you can add to your purse or, you know, your key chain. They’re very versatile. And then from there we looked at okay: what are some of the more cheaper ways we could help other dice collectors, you know, have something special? And that’s where the dice potions came in because that’s the just plain glass bottles is how I display my dice in my studio– the ones that aren’t used for a specific character. And so Deacon had the great idea to add colored resin to match those. And it just took off from there. And that’s probably our second bestseller is our dice potions.

Courtney: 25:39

That’s a really fun sounding journey. And I definitely think that with the days bag charms, that it makes sense that most people only offer that as already attached. And so I can see why that would be something that folks would be really interested in. I am curious about some of the logistics around inventory and knowing how much stuff to stock up on, especially when at the beginning, because obviously once you get more sales and you can see what’s popular and what makes sense to have a few more items on hand for, but what about when you first got started with the shop as a whole, versus even when you decide to bring in a new product that you haven’t offered before? What is your decision process on how much inventory to have on hand when you start?

Andrea: 26:26

So that’s a really good question because I’m pretty sure we didn’t have a solid answer. What we did know was we needed to provide a variety of things. And so we really shot for having 5 to 10 of each item when we first opened. And so we probably had 7 to 10 minis, both player, character and monster minis, and then Deacon did a phenomenal job and he busted out like seven to 10 different size, different kind of dice trays. And that’s really kind of where we focused on was having a variety to get the widest appeal across the board to potential customers. And so that meant different colored trays, different sizes, different wood types, wood stains for the minis. It meant in different races. We had some Orcs, we had some Elves we’ve had humans, the different monster minis. as well. And also on the minis having different color schemes. One of the things that we really wanted Wolfwood Gaming to be known for, again, as an accessibility thing, is we believe everyone should be able to see themselves at the table. And so we really focused on from a mini perspective, having all different skin colors on the minis so that no matter what someone could look and say, I can see myself; I can see my character. You know, as a, as a person of color, I found a, mini that was painted for me. As someone who, you know, maybe was, Asian, they could see themselves on the table so that it, wasn’t just kind of like a homogenous inventory of, you know, the same kind of characters that all look the same, like mainstream art. So that was really what we focused on was having a variety of things, a variety of colors that would appeal. And since then, the best thing as small business can do is continue to add to inventory. So we’re adding anywhere between one to five things a week to our shop.