What happened between green ronin and osseum
- Thread starter Corvidae
- Start date
Nikchick
Explorer
helium3 said:
Bear with me, this is going to be a little game industry history lesson.
Osseum handled sales and fulfillment, including warehousing of product, shipping, invoicing and collection. Green Ronin started as a side project that Chris and I were doing for fun (first product: Ork! the Roleplaying Game, a beer and pretzels RPG that had nothing to do with D20). Green Ronin first used Wizards Attic as fulfillment service (doing essentially what Osseum would later do) because Chris's first company (Ronin Publishing, started years before he went to work at Wizards of the Coast, through which he and his partners published material for The Whispering Vault and where Chris self-published his Feng Shui book Blood of the Valiant after Daedalus went out of business) had used Wizard's Attic. For a company that was just a side project, hiring a service like Wizards Attic was more efficient than taking on staff and warehousing for an individual product. At the time, distributors were also much more likely to take on clients who were represented by a fulfillment house than look at each individual little company and try to set up terms with each of them. When D20 exploded and companies were literally springing up every day with new D20 products, that only became more true.
Wizard's Attic flamed out of business in a manner very similar to Osseum, leaving its many clients (I think they represented 50 or more clients at one time) to look for ways to continue their businesses. By the time Wizards Attic went out, Green Ronin was doing quite a lot of business because of our D20 work and Chris and I had both moved to doing the company fulltime. We considered just making the leap to handling everything inside the company. I'd done sales work in my time at White Wolf, Atlas Games, and Cheapass Games and I personally had the contacts and knew the ropes for everything on the hobby side. But at the same time we were making this decision, the guys from Osseum were starting up their company. They had a long pedigree with TSR and Wizards of the Coast. They knew the book trade in particular, which was the one area where we knew Green Ronin needed more penetration. They made us a pitch that included continuing on the fulfillment model, they'd handle our warehousing issue and improve our penetration with the book trade. They offered a bunch of other benefits as well, like contacts with book trade publishers and computer game companies interested in licensing RPGs.
For over three years it all went according to plan. They handled everything, gave us reports and payments in full and on time. They did what they said they were going to do, our book trade penetration increased, our warehousing was handled, we paid them for the service at what seemed like a fair cut for everyone and we didn't have to absorb the additional overhead of employees or warehouse space on our own.
jgbrowning
Hero
helium3 said:
nevermind.. someone's quicker on the post than I am.
joe b.
Twiggly the Gnome
Legend
helium3 said:
That's pretty much the standand in the comics industry, I don't think there's really any way to run a comic shop without dealing with Diamond Comic Distributors, Inc.
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