Rook's Comics and Games

First of all, thanks to every one who made Rook's a great place to be in 2009. We had a great year sales wise and an even better year for community growth. As for sales, here is some information. 2009 saw 16.18% growth over 2008 This seems like a great accomplishment to me, especially given the countries economic woes Our top 3 departments remained the same from 2008 to 2009 This tells me that we know what we are selling.

Our store is beginning to have an identity. Magic The Gathering went from our 3rd best department in 08 to our best department in 09 I am glad to see this as we really tried to push Magic as a great game in 2009. We put a lot of effort into making Magic awesome and it is good to see the reward for that. Miniatures grew 10% in 2009. I am happy with this as we had a rough economy and good competition from Rocky Mountain Hobbiez. If we can grow Miniatures this much in 2010 I will be very happy.

Comics & Graphic Novels fell by 8% in 2009. This is a bit of a disappointment. The bright side to this is that Graphic Novels as a category grew 8%. I think graphic novels are the future of the comic industry so I am glad to see that area growing.

Food sales (soda) increased 22.16% over 2008. This indicates to me that we had a lot more people coming in on a regular basis. Now that those numbers are out of the way, we can talk about what it all means.

Our greatest success was the growth of Magic the Gathering. We really worked at making Magic fun again and it defiantly paid off. We instituted an achievements program that was amazing at generating sales. We have since applied an achievements program to Warhammer and it has been very successful. In the new year we are planing to to make an achievement program for Warmachines & Hordes, and World of Warcraft as well.

Even though our sales of comics were down, I think that comics were a success for 2009. We hired Cliff to mainly deal with comics and I think that is working out well. Our comic sales may be down but I am sure that our profit from those sales is increasing. In addition, graphic novels increased and that is what I want to see. With all the great digital tech coming out, I see periodic comic sales decreasing for the foreseeable future.

Another great thing was the growth in our customer base. We have seen a lot more customers walking in the door which is what we needed for growth. We had a great time at Catapaloza this year. We gave away comics for e-mail addresses and that program was a great success. Our newsletter now has 300 participants and a lot of those came from our two days at Catapaloza.

Everything is not perfect however. There were a few things that didn't work out so well in 2009. The first was our time spent at the Gallatin Valley Fair. I don't feel like we really gained any new customers from our time spent at the fair. When you factor employee costs for when we were away from the store and mine and Sara's time, this was a very unprofitable venture. Another disappointment was Flames of War. We started off great with this product but the second half of the year has be terrible for it. There are a lot of things going on with this. On problem may have been how crowded our play space can be. FOW can take up a lot of room and I feel like we often didn't provide that room. A lot of the blame also goes to Battlefront Miniatures, the manufacturer of FOW. Between out of stock issues and an exclusive deal with a distributor we don't use, it was simply too difficult to order their products. On top of that their drastically raised their minimum required to get free shipping. We already have a bad margin with this product and when we pay shipping it is much worse.

Overall, Rook's had a great year. We had a lot of things go right and a very few go wrong. Our community grew and I feel like we did a good job of taking care of that community. We increased our sales and turned a profit. I am very hopeful about 2010 and next week I will be going over our plans for the year to come.