As of today the Rixx Javix Store has closed for business.
As you can probably imagine this decision was not an easy one to make. Having a license to sell my Eve art was a long-time goal of mine since 2014 when I first started talking to CCP about helping them re-launch the Eve Store which transformed into selling two sets of art prints with QMx back in 2015/16 and at Fanfest that year. I established the Creative Slack channel to help artists and creatives, which has grown into the Creative Discord these days and helped other artists secure licenses with CCP in the past few years so they could legally sell their own artworks. And then last year it was finally time to make the jump myself.
I'd like to thank everyone at CCP Games for supporting the effort and being great to work with on this project. Very special thanks to Anna and Lara for working with me this past year, you are both incredible and I couldn't have done this without you. The decision to close the store has nothing to do with CCP and everything to do with time and money.
I built a rather complicated system in order to achieve what I wanted with the store. My goal was to provide everyone affordable shipping options anywhere in the world. In order to do that I had to carefully choose my partners and how to best deal with the shipping issues that would arise. I am proud that we created a system that was beneficial to my customers, items were printed at 30+ locations around the world to save on costs, taxes, vats, etc - and to speed shipping. It worked extremely well. Unfortunately it worked best when the volume was at least decent. In many cases, because the end result to the customer was a flat rate, larger orders ultimately meant that I was losing money on the order.
And while the first six months following the launch was solid, this year the demand has dropped significantly since January. The trend has been steadily losing ground in the past six months. Despite adding new products every few weeks and promoting the store as much as I could - the trend was seemingly impossible to counter.
All of which means it is costing me money to operate the three systems needed to keep the store open. Not to mention the time and effort needed to create new illustrations (often 40-80 hours or more) that no one is purchasing. In the last few months I sold one Gila poster and one Hecate poster for example. All in all I managed to sell slightly over 300 individual posters, raise some money for Able Gamers, and provide every employee at CCP Games a calendar for the Holidays last year. Which is pretty awesome.
I thought demand would be higher. I was wrong. I have no regrets. I learned a lot about operating and establishing an e-commerce store front. And I enjoy creating new illustrations for a game I have a great deal of passion for. Ultimately this was simply not a sustainable enterprise. And I had to make a hard decision I didn't want to make.
A very special thank you to each and every one of you that did order from the store. Sincerely, thank you. I had a blast answering questions, solving issues, and working with my partners to get products in your hands. I'm proud that the store has no complaints and a 100% satisfaction rating, that every order was delivered, and every issue was successfully addressed. I'm excited about all the walls covered with my art in all of your gaming rooms and encouraged by the support you've given me over the past year. And beyond. Thank you.
Onward & Upward.
PS: Apologies for doing this so suddenly. But I felt that making a big deal out of closing the store and wringing promotional equity out of a special sale or going out of business month would be exploitive and disingenuous. And that is just not who I am.