Interview with Purrincess, artist and creator of Fire Emblem plush dolls
CRM: Hello Purrincess! Could you please introduce yourself to the Cosplay Realm readers?
Purrincess: Hi there! I go by Purrincess or Cocoa, and I love making fan merch! Right now my kick is Fire Emblem: Three Houses, but in general, I love making things inspired by video games - I remember I was going over my convention catalogs in the past and thought to myself, "Despite me tabling at anime conventions I have almost no anime merchandise..." ahaha.
CRM: You make a lot of awesome Fire Emblem fan merch! What is it about this game series that has inspired you so much?
Purrincess: Thank you! I think Fire Emblem is a game series that's very easy to get emotionally attached to. There are pretty high stakes for some of the characters, and as we grow to love them as we get to know them, their desires become our own. It makes it very easy to get into the story. In general, I think FE installments always have a great cast!
Besides the series itself being so fun, loving this game has brought me closer to so many talented people, who have in turn, inspired me. Buying Fire Emblem merch in my early high school days is a big part of the reason I make it now - I always need more!
CRM: One of your biggest projects recently has been your line of Fire Emblem plush dolls! Are these the first plush products you have made? How did you first decide to make these dolls?
Purrincess: Oh boy! Yes, for some reason, on my first attempt with plush-making, I decided to make five designs. It was right after the game had come out and I had finished all the routes, so I think I was feeling particularly enamored with Three Houses then, haha.
My friends in the past had made a couple dolls each from Fire Emblem: Fates, and were expressing they wanted to try doing their favorites Three Houses as well. Our friend group is well-rounded in that most of our faves are from different houses - I was like well, I'm the Dimitri stan amongst us, so guess I'll do him! Hehe. It really ballooned from there because I love everyone. I'm the kind of person who will buy both colors of a dress if I can't decide which one to get. I couldn't decide which characters to do, so I chose like... most of my favorites at the time.
CRM: One thing we found really interesting during the process of bringing these dolls to life was following your progress and updates with your manufacturer! What are a few things you as an artist learned through this process?
Purrincess: I really underestimated the amount of behind-the-scenes work it takes! I thought I would just have to make the design and go, but revisions took up way more time than I could have ever imagined. I also learned a lot about marketing and organization! With so much data and assets to keep track of I think you have to really be on top of things - I wouldn't even say I was near perfect, either. But there's no way the me of five years ago would have been able to handle a project of this size.
CRM: You have a second round of dolls set to open for pre orders later this month! How did you decide on what characters to make for your plush doll collections?
Purrincess: Yep! They've just opened, actually - I didn't realize it'd be mentioned here, haha!
First and foremost I decide who I love! I think when it comes to content creation, love has to be the first ingredient, because it'll show if it's not. Your motivation will dwindle if it isn't, and it'll be really easy to get frustrated. Some of my fellow plush creators have agreed with me that our parents would be super angry if they saw some of our profit margins, but we do it because we love it! Everything I make I just wanted for myself, hehe.
Since I love so many characters from Three Houses already, I could rank them easily enough to have a vague idea of who I'd want for the next round, but of course I'd like to know who the people following me would like. They are the ones on this journey with me, after all, so I also took a survey and asked my community who else they'd like to see. Some of the answers are pretty fun! It's also really nice to know that every character out there has a fan who loves them enough to want a plush of them. I got requests for even the Death Knight and Alois!
Preorder Wave 2 of the Fire Emblem plush dolls now!
CRM: Your Fire Emblem plush dolls have been super popular! It seems they sell out pretty quickly too. What are some ways that you manage stock and inventory and the huge amount of orders you have gotten for these cuties?
Purrincess: This is terrible and I don't recommend it, but for the first couple months of the preorders, I was keeping track of order numbers using... tally marks in a Google doc. Oh my god. Every week, I'd go through each email I got from my storefront telling me I had an order, and add those into my doc one by one. For the first month and a half, sitting down to do this every week took about two hours per session. To this day I still am not sure what a better method would be for that amount of orders, LOL.
I think I'm a very particular person and having a rough estimate wasn't good enough; I wanted exact numbers. But this way, it helped me extrapolate the sales numbers so that I ordered enough when the final number had to be ordered, while still keeping orders open.
Right now my storefronts' technology is good enough they can usually just tell me what I have left, as long as I put the correct number in the first place! But sometimes even I miscount, I am just one human after all, haha.
CRM: Besides just the sales, the response to these plush dolls has been crazy all over Twitter! What are some other ways you have felt the effects of the response you’ve gotten?
Purrincess: I would say I'm much more conscious of having so many more eyes on my own space now. Some days it's good, and other days it makes me really worried that I might say something stupid and then be cancelled or whatever. I've had my twitter since high school, and in the days of old it was just an online diary most days. I could scream into a void and sometimes it'd answer back. I can't really do that anymore!
At the end of the day, it's really nice. I'm glad I can just have fun and other people can have fun with me.
CRM: Through this process you have also collaborated with other artists. What is it like to collaborate with other creators on product designs?
Purrincess: It's very fun! But, I should mention my co-designer for the dolls, Shy, is one of my best friends, and has been for a handful of years now. We love to help each other out, and both of us are very warm, and I wouldn't say either of us leads the other, more like we support each other equally. So working together just felt casual and fun - we will definitely do more in the future as well; we actually have plans for a joint store at some point!
In general I'm glad I choose to collaborate with people I'm close to, as we know our work ethics and styles very well, or our tastes are very similar. It makes for a very easy collaboration process!
CRM: Another super cool Fire Emblem product you have worked on is your wax seal stamps! You have made designs based on the Crest of Flames and each of the three houses. Can you tell us a bit about the stamps?
Purrincess: I'm so glad you think they're cool too! They're a super niche item that I've never seen sold and I wasn't sure anyone else would want them. I think wax seal stamps in general are a suuuuper cool item, and my infatuation with them kept any negative worries at bay. I was just really excited to make them. I'm a big fan of old-fashioned vintage items, and medieval settings like Fire Emblem are just ripe with the possibilities! The wax stamps are actually the first in a planned line of FE3H-inspired vintage items - I have plans to make matching stationery sets and a journal as well.
CRM: And while we’re talking about the three houses, which is your favorite house and why? Do you have some favorite characters outside of that house?
Purrincess: I think everyone has an affinity for the house they chose first, and I'm no different, so the Blue Lions are my kids through and through! They all need a big hug, and I'm very much a mom friend, so maybe that's why I like them so much. I want to dote on them and tell them all that everything will be okay. :'(
At the beginning of the game, Sylvain talks about three beautiful girls, one from each house, and it was then and there I saw my taste was very Sylvain-core... besides Mercedes, he mentions Dorothea and Hilda, who are also very dear to me! Besides their unique strengths, I also see parts of myself in them. Plus Sylvain is totally right, both of them are gorgeous too, lol!
CRM: You have both an Etsy storefront and a website for your products. What are some of the pros and cons to each format of selling products?
Purrincess: Etsy has wonderful traffic - its search engine and ad placement in Google searches are no joke! It's just very fee-heavy. My website storefront is currently run with Shopify, which is a bit slower and less feature-heavy than Etsy, but still gets the job done with way less fees. I do like both! Managing both becomes very busy, especially when an item sells on one storefront and you have to remember to update your other one - it can get very messy and lead to unhappy customers if you don't. Thankfully this is what I do full time now, so it's been manageable!
CRM: Besides Fire Emblem, you also make products for a few of our other favorite fandoms like Final Fantasy and Kingdom Hearts to name a few! Can you tell us about some of your other favorite products you’ve made?
Purrincess: Oh! I did make sticky note booklets for Kingdom Hearts I was very happy with. Since smartphones were introduced in Kingdom Hearts III, I was playing with the idea of how the kids would use them, and am in enough group chats that I put those two ideas together. I was able to make a full page for notes as well as smaller individual tabs - both very helpful for little reminders or lists, and something I'd never seen before. I love making new things that can be useful to people! That product was also more graphic design-oriented than typical art, and that was both challenging and a lot of fun.
CRM: Do you have any upcoming projects that you can tell us about?
Purrincess: Ooh! I mentioned one above, like my vintage Fodlan collection, but one I'm really really excited about is a collaboration with some of my other Fire Emblem friends - a full Three Houses tarot deck. Major and minor arcana! I'm illustrating Dorothea and Hilda (surprise), and tarot reading is something I do rather frequently, so this is another merch item I just really want for myself as well. Being privy to the works-in-progress and design choices as a contributor, I already know the final product is going to be fantastically polished and beautiful. I seriously can't wait.
We're actually getting pretty close to the preorder period - our organizer plans on those being put up in the springtime of this year. You can check it out on Twitter - I actually help run the Twitter account! Our team of artists all really love the game, and as I said about love - you can see it shine through.
CRM: Thanks so much for taking the time to chat with us! Is there anything else that you would like to say to the Cosplay Realm readers?
Purrincess: Thank you so much for having me, and thank you so much if you read all my long-winded answers! I'm just always happy to share my experiences with people - I hope it can inspire others to try fun and creative things too!
Twitter: https://twitter.com/purrmaid
Website: https://purrincess.com/