Last month we announced and launched 6 promo packs of all-new Wingspan birds. Each pack focuses on a different region (Asia, Great Britain, Canada, Continental Europe, New Zealand, and USA):

We packaged each set of 25 birds in its own “booster pack” so customers could pick and choose the right combination of packs for them. It’s okay to buy all of them, but you could also just try a few of the packs to see what they add to Wingspan.

It’s rare to have a different product design for our webstore vs retailers. Due to the extra graphic design and production, we prefer to have a single version of each product. The majority of Wingspan’s 2 million copies in circulation have sold through retailers (not our webstore), so we also wanted to offer these packs to retailers and distributors. Based on feedback and experience, we knew that local retailers would want a way to buy the packs together and then display them.

After much discussion and experimentation, we created a display box for retailers. It contains all 6 promo packs, so a retailer can sell the box by itself or open the box to sell individual packs:

The display box also prompted us to slightly change the packaging of each pack so that there’s a band of color at the top, signaling that each pack is different. We also moved the name of the pack closer to the top:

The display box set is unique to local retailers; it will be available from them starting on December 5.

Have you seen other cases of slightly different product design between a publisher’s webstore (or crowdfunding campaign) vs the retail version? I’m not talking about gameplay or component differences (i.e., deluxe vs standard editions), though that is another consideration when trying to appeal to early adopters vs long-term retail viability.

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There’s more information about the new promo bird packs in today’s World of Wingspan newsletter, including the expansion timeline and a region vs region variant.

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