Hello everyone, have you all aware that for every decks you got from T11 now, all of those decks comes with the pesky plastic tabs on the top and the barcode on the bottom. I know that those are helpful when it comes to the decks to be provided to TARGET and Walmart to be sold on their stores, with the plastic tabs to have it hanged on the shelves and the barcodes to easily inputing the item during checkout. But, when it comes to people who get them directly from here or from Murphys, they start to get annoying.
I am aware that some people would open their decks by removing everything that wraps the deck, though some collectors like to open them while retaining the cellophane of the deck. The cellowrap is usually the place where to stick the seal of the deck without tearing it up to open the deck. The barcode sticker can easily be removed, but the plastic tab doesn't. The tape of the plastic tab is very hard most of the times, that whenever you are trying to pull it off, especially the cellowrap is very fragile, it ended up wrecking the top part of the cellowrap. It starts to get on my nerves, for real. And I though, by getting these decks directly from the source, it won't have those annoying things pasted on the deck.
Hey there! I'm a playing card collector as well, been collecting decks since I started learning my first magic tricks since I was around 13 (almost 17 years ago!). I get the feeling 100% on how these decks are presented when you open the package for the first time.
Being on the other side of it all, I see firsthand how much time goes into crafting this beautiful art that we all hold in our hands. Just to name one project, I am a giant Stranger Things fan, so when Netflix approached us to do a deck for them, I was hands on that project since Day 1. We worked for months and months and months on end and I went back and forth with our designers over that period of time making sure even the smallest of easter eggs was fleshed out and dialed in. Nothing went unnoticed, so the final result is the culmination of thousands of hours of hard work from our team.
All of that to say, we don't like
anything to obscure or block the view of this wonderful art that we created - it's the last thing we want. But we also want to create products that are as affordable as possible so that we don't have to increase pricing and charge $20 per deck like many other companies do in the industry. If we had to have two separate sets of inventory for stores like Target and Barnes and Noble, and another set of inventory for when you buy from our website, that would mean double inventory charges. That would also mean double the warehousing space that would take up in our warehouse, and it would force us to increase pricing, which is the
last thing we want to do. Our main focus is to keep these decks as affordable as possible, so we can get them in the hands of as many people as possible and expand the hobby that we all love.
Because of standardization purposes with retail partners, many of our decks require hang tags. As collectors, I know we don’t want them. Super, easy, quick fix…just rip it off like a band-aid! A quick example can be shown
HERE.
Regarding barcodes, we are in the same facility used to ship GoPro and Beats by Dre, and as such, a world-class facility operates in a super organized manner. For standardization and accuracy in shipping, each product needs to be scanned and verified before being packaged. This ensures that the product you order is the product that gets put into the package. Every deck is labeled with a barcode to ensure extremely high accuracy.
A bright side to the barcoding is that these go on the backs of all decks, so you can still display the front of the box (which most people display anyway) without issue. In a perfect world, we'd have no barcodes and hang tabs on anything, but it is a small sacrifice we must make to ensure accuracy of packaging, speed, and efficiency.
Hopefully this makes more sense, and as a last note, we are always incredibly thankful that people care this much about the world of playing cards. This is our life, and as funny as that sounds, we wouldn't have it any other way. Pieces of paper can bring this much passion and joy to all of us, and I think that's such a beautiful thing that we all get to enjoy together!
