The Empty Shop Paradox

You may have noticed Ellusionist doing a lot of pre-orders... Why is this?

As a business, keeping items in stock has been our biggest challenge lately. 

It's just impossible to stock control 'sensational' products.

When things take off, it's so many factors above what we usually sell, that we blow out of everything we have.

Not everything is a hit in life, so in a normal year, the winners pay for the losers. Like the movie business. 

But we've just been hit with an unprecedented string of winners.

Last year, selling thousands of a single item, only to sell thousands of the next one, one week later - was unheard of.

But everything we've released this year has turned to gold. 

• Vanish by Justin Miller (perpetually sold out on pre-order for 2 months... Every time we got more stock, it was already sold)
• Any Thought of Card to Pocket by Geraint Clarke & Christian Grace (sold out within 30 hours)
• DITTO (basically sold out on pre-order, it came in 10 days early and we only had 12 left)
• & HEARTBEAT (which right now, is the trick of the year)

The only reason SCRIBE is still in stock is because it took 1.5years to manufacture, and we quadrupled our order back then to counteract the delay.

But even SCRIBE is on the same level of success.

So we just wanted to be honest about the Empty Shop paradox. The better the products, the less we have - and the more pre-orders we'll need to do.

WHAT ARE THE OTHER REASONS to pre-order something?

1. Expensive Production
   Because we want to know how successful it will be, like HACKER, it cost over $100,000 to make the first 1,000 (which are being made as we speak).
   
   Pre-ordering this device means we can manage stock correctly without any expensive guess work on such a high-quality item. Electronics ain't cheap.
   
   
2. Sometimes buses come at once.
   You know that old saying "no bus for a while, but then 2 come at once."
   
   It's the same for creating products. It may take us 6 to 12 months of development, but then 3 or 4 things are ready at the same time. This causes a backlog in our editing pipeline. We could have the stock, but maybe not the trailer yet. Making it perfect for a pre-order.
   
   This happened with SCRIBE, Any Thought of Card to Pocket and HEARTBEAT, which were all filmed in the same week. Some we had the stock and not the trailer. Others we had the trailer - and the stock was on the way.
   
   
3. Out of stock / best sellers
   If we sell out, we know we're making more. Maybe it'll take 2 to 4 weeks. So we can pre-order that next batch, knowing a rough estimate of when it's going to arrive. This works for things like Vanish, which have quick turnaround times, because they're handmade in smaller batches.

Just know, we're working hard behind the scenes to not have to pre-order these items - and increase stock availability.

Huge sales for:

• 1 month is a statistic.
• 2 months is a fluke.
• 3 months in a row... That's a trend.

So now we're aware that we've caught a wave, 3 months of solid bangers, we'll be investing in larger and larger initial order quantities. To satiate your demand.

Thank you for working with us and supporting these pre-orders. <3

If you have any questions, leave them in the comments section below.