I had the pleasure of interviewing Carol Monahan, former WotC employee, who shares an insight into the early days of the company and the Pokémon TCG, as Director of Sales & Logistics. Let me know what you think!
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This was a great read. Very insightful. Thanks for sharing.
Cheers!
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Thank you for sharing a wonderful article about what it was like at wizards.
Most interesting part for me was the section talking about the sale to Hasbro and Wizards interest in raising value.
"…the sale would close, September 30th, 1999 – at the end of our fiscal 3rd quarter. This meant a full-court press to raise the asset value as much as possible by that date, including bringing in and shipping out as much Pokémon as logistically possible. A box of booster packs in our inventory would simply be worth what we paid to print it (a wash), while a box of booster packs sold to a distributor or chain store would be worth its wholesale price, even if they hadn’t paid yet (a value many times the printing cost).
Converting cash into products, and products into accounts receivable, as quickly as possible was our entire focus in the Production/Logistics area that quarter. Sales offered customers some extended terms (60 or 90 days to pay, rather than the usual 30), in order to encourage them to buy all of the product they’d need for Christmas prior to September 30th."
I wonder if this is why there was such a large amount of Unlimited Base, Jungle, and Fossil printed at the time. Very interesting to think that this could be what caused Pokemon to still be around with so much original product 25years later.
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Thank you for sharing. That was utterly fascinating.
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Thanks for sharing
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A great read. Thank you.
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This was an incredible read!
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That was great, thank you!
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Great share! Thank you.
I found the part about setting release dates to prevent stores sniping customers, Seems obvious, but I never considered that.
As a fan of shadowless, I also found her comments about the “stealth limited edition” shadowless run fascinating. If what she says is true, then Shadowless was in fact an accidental first print unlimited, instead of left-overs from the 1st edition run. 
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Great interview. Thanks for posting.
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Great read, thanks for sharing!
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Thanks for the kind words @mrbubbles I appreciate it. I have been looking forward to sharing this one for a while 
Yes, that was quite surprising to read! It was insightful, and i’m not sure if that information was known prior to the interview?
On the topic of Shadowless, the Blastoise card pictured is the only shadowless card I own. I wish I had more of them, but it was only within the past few years that I learned what shadowless cards were, and that I had one. Maybe i’ve got more that are not holographic, as i’ve got tons of bulk cards from this era.
@caughtatpoint @manumalin @D3F14NC3 @Dyl @codytcas @meta @Mussundwerdich Thank you for taking the time to read, and to comment, I really appreciate anyone taking the time to read what I put together. There’s lots of cool things being published each week, but I will share the most relevant TCG related content here in the future.
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