As many of you know, we've carried product from The Broken Token for quite some time now, and we've always tried to keep the stock current. Lately, there have been delays challenges related to restocking, but it was nothing we felt was a huge challenge for us; it just meant we had to be patient with our restocks, and order a little more deeply than normal.
However, The Broken Token feels that this problem is significant enough across all their retailers, and so they've made the difficult decision of leaving the retail market, at least for a time, and are shifting to an online-only and convention-only model, effective immediately. We were notified yesterday, via the following email:
To our Valued Wholesale Partners –
Since 2013, we at The Broken Token have been pouring our hearts and souls into the fun task of bringing organization and joy to the boardgaming world. It’s been a labor of love, and so amazing to watch a garage/hobby business turn into a real thriving business. Demand for our product has grown year over year, and we’ve been working hard to increase our production capacity to meet that demand by adding more equipment and personnel.
However, as you, our valued retail and distribution partners have experienced over the past several months, continuing to keep pace with demand has been an increasingly challenging task, causing us to present you with longer and longer lead times for fulfillment. This has led us to do a lot of analysis and soul searching on how to resolve the challenge of satisfying our customers, both direct and retail, while maintaining our promises as a brand.
As a fellow small business, we hope you will understand that the decision we came to was made with hours of deliberation, consulting with trusted business associates, and with the best intentions of keeping our business healthy and our hard-working team gainfully employed. Therefore it is with a heavy heart that we must suspend all wholesale sales at this time, in order to keep up with demand and maintain our brand integrity.
We understand that this is a drastic change to the relationship we’ve been growing and fostering with you, and if you have any questions or feedback, I’m happy to talk with you directly.
“But Jack! I have an order in with you already!”
We will be fulfilling all orders that have been placed by the time you receive this email. It may take us a little while to fulfill them all, but we will be getting through the queue and getting them out to you.
“But Jack! I was building an order to send to you right now!”
I am so sorry for the timing. In order to fulfill the current workload, we cannot accept any more wholesale orders. Many of you have already experienced longer than usual delays in getting your orders, and accepting more orders right now would only exacerbate the situation.
I will be taking on the role of Events Coordinator here at The Broken Token, as the role of Sales Manager will have a much lower demand on my time. This means I will be at more conventions in the future, and will hopefully be able to meet more of you. I have truly enjoyed working with you all and I will forever remember the kindness you all showed when I was in my car accident and was still recovering. I will miss talking to you all, but I do hope to see you at conventions.
We all want to thank you sincerely, from the bottom of our hearts, for putting your faith in our business and products, and coming along on this journey with us. We wish you all the best with your business, and we promise to continue supporting friendly local game stores.
Sincerely,
Jack Allen
and Everyone at The Broken Token
We have the deepest respect for our business partners, including The Broken Token. We are hopeful they'll be able to continue to make great products as they work through this transition. We also hope that, over time, they may find their way back into hobby establishments like ours.
In the meantime, our current stock of The Broken Token will be available for sale until we run out. If you had an item on special order with us, unfortunately, we are no longer able to complete that order. We'll be contacting folks with special orders to let them know of the situation personally. We're also in the process of identifying other manufacturers that might be a good source for wooden organizers and other accessories. We'll keep you posted as we add new lines to our inventory.
As always, if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask one of our Staffers!