Y’all are gonna make fun of me but the RT Merch and Liscening Panel is like the most interesting thing to me
Quality control and remaining on brand is the focus of the product teams - they have tons and tons of submissions that are just not representative of the product/show/company and it’s a disaster
RWBY Crystal Quest was a mess from the start - the characters didn’t look at all like the characters, Jaune was the main icon but not actually playable - it was presented as a cutesy game but there were sexy outfits for all the characters and didn’t look child friendly at all
Some of the changes they had to do for the game:
The head of quality control begged the audience to please stop sending RWBY body pillow ideas to the team - they don’t want it and it’s not appropriate for 16 year old characters
They are all ashamed of the Pyrrha plushie and that was ultimately a result of a rushed merch release schedule - they want to repeat it again, they’re plushies are all carefully looked over before production
Achievement Hunter is some of the hardest merch to quality control - 1. Because the jokes move so fast and it’s hard to release a good shirt about a joke while still making it quality 2. People just don’t know how to spell Achievement - some of the crew actually wore misspelled shirts! They’re planning on making a shirt with various misspelling of Achieve
Coop Video - the exclusive RTX store designed to look like an old blockbuster - was one of the favorite projects in the last year, and was a very fun and hardworking project that took almost all departments — and was completed in 6 months!!
The chip bag packaging for all sweatshirts (I’ll edit in pictures of it later because it’s very clever) was created by John Benson and he deserves a lot of the credit for most packaging
They’ve wanted to do RWBY cosplay weapons for a long time, so with Ruby’s scythe coming to the store soon, expect to see others!
There was a rejected idea to make a purple hat that said Make America Grape Again - the People Like Grapes shorts are the best selling thing in the store still!
Geoff Ramsey used to do all the t shirts - and it was a relative disaster - the quotes would be typed in word and pasted onto a simple shirt designs and would try to get them done within a month of the idea being thought of
Geoff was also a terrible archivist, he never saves any shirt designs so a lot of the old designs are just totally gone
The community is a huge part of the content tees - the product team can’t watch all the content and miss jokes, but the community submits a lot of cool designs to 1. See what people are interested in 2. See what jokes are popular and 3. Get creative ideas
It’s much harder to sell things like Funhaus shirts if Funhause won’t actually wear them! The designs are usually approved in one way or another by the cast because they need to actually wear them to sell them
There was even a joke that they want to release AH boys into a mall and see what they come back with to see what they can sell
The AH Moonball was the first thing the head liscencor was tasked with, but took the actual company tweeting at Achievement Hunter for the liscening to get into motion
Funko Pops were #1 on their want list for this year, and they’re very happy it’s paying off, the pops will be available around August!
There’s one woman - Monica - who does ALL the women’s line for Let’s Play, she makes sure it fits right, what women will want to wear, and that it’s for fans to express their love for the product and not sexualize the shirt wearer in any way
They showed some cool sneaky peaks that WERENT in any of the other panels!! (For reward for walking all the way to the edge of the convention center) that I will have a separate post for later!!!
