oldauntiny GOs Golden Hour retrospective and transparency report

It feels a weird time to begin a reflection on Golden Hour as I personally still feel knee deep in Golden Hour GOs. 

As I’m beginning this, we have just finished sending out the Golden Hour Batch 2 GOs, and we are about to start Seriously Sorting Batch 3 GOs. Honestly, this is a daunting task. There are 22 GOs in Batch 3, and there are likely at least 70+ people total. Which maybe that doesn’t sound like a lot (or maybe it does), but it’s on the heels of having sent 90+ people over 4,000 items. 

But let me start at the beginning. 

The Plan 

Cassandra and I felt we had learned some valuable lessons during Crazy Form (just as we had during Bouncy), and we planned to incorporate this hard won knowledge into some adjustments for our GOs. 

We had been resistant to doing Fixed Claims for a variety of reasons that don’t much matter now, but given the collectors we had attracted to our GOs and our own collecting habits, we decided we would have 2 sets of fixed. Two sets is a small enough amount that I felt confident that if something went wrong, we could cover it. If only 3 of our fixed joiners paid me before the purchase deadline, I’d still be able to make sure everyone’s cards could be secured with my own capital. 

We kept the same number of priority claims. We really wanted to keep our priority claims the same as they had been, which meant we would be guaranteeing the member to everyone in priority. They would have a guaranteed claim, and then we would fill the unclaimed cards by opening to the rest of the public. Priority joiners were not required to join any number of GOs, and everything was opt in. (Perhaps savvy people can already see the problem with this plan.) 

Finally, we had a new idea: a last call chat. Truthfully, this has been one of my better ideas. Instagram doesn’t allow me to have a broadcast channel because as far as instagram is concerned, I’m basically no one (and Instagram is right). But this means, to get joiners for our unclaimed cards, we needed to rely on posting on Instagram. 

Posts are notoriously hard to find on instagram. Small GOMs complain all the time about this, but it applies to us too even though some people consider us large or midsized GOMs. For any GO that wasn’t a fancall raffle, I can count on one hand how many times we got a joiner from posting publicly on Instagram. Yeah. 

So the idea with the last call chat is that as we are posting the form to Instagram, we would also send the form to this chat. It would basically function like a broadcast chat in that we would just be sending forms here, and the people who were in the chat would be notified about it. 

I can’t speak for the people in this Last Call chat, but from our perspective, this chat worked great. We were able to get a lot of open slots in our GOs filled, and we had some fairly regular joiners from this chat, which is always helpful when it comes to sorting and packing. 

And finally, in order to avoid having to cover unclaimed POBs, we decide to enact a system we’d seen other GOMs do. We would split the cost of unclaimed POBs amongst the joiners in the GO, and then the unclaimed POBs would be raffled off. 

In theory, we thought it was the best option. Spoiler alert: it didn’t work.  

The Best Laid Plans 

It’s funny because looking back, I was overwhelmed literally immediately. 

We had told our prio chat not to worry; we’d open for everything once we had previews for everything. During Crazy Form, it took several weeks to get previews, and when we got previews, we’d usually get four previews a night. A totally doable amount to deal with. 

But no. 

That night that pobs started getting announced, I think they dropped 14 at once, all of them with previews. I was sweating, making GOM drop forms, in a total fugue state. I just wanted to get through it, but everyone was overwhelmed. Our prio chat, our fixed chat, atiny as a whole. Everyone. 

We went from asking for no money from our fixed chat to needing like $200 in one night. It was… a lot. Even thinking about it now, I feel like I’m about to start sweating again, that panicked feeling of not having enough time setting in. 

So we didn’t start the comeback as a slow and steady marathon. It was a full on sprint from day one, so is it any wonder that I was tired by the time we got to June? Much less July and August?  Much less now? At the end of September?

I was also financially beaten down by the end of May. During the preorder period alone, I had covered over $400 worth of unclaimed POBs, plus I had purchased every single Jongho that dropped. That means I’d spent about $600 on photocards in May. 

If you had stopped and done the math when I was talking about our priority chat, you may have noticed that we had set ourselves up to buy at least 6 sets of POBs from every store. We were getting 2 sets for our fixed chat, which is doable. And we were getting 4 sets for our priority chat, which would also be a totally doable amount on its own. 

But combined? 6 sets was not doable. 

This is the first comeback where we have had to cancel sets. For several stores, we cancelled more than one set. 

Cancelling sets feels bad, and it sucks for everyone. People who were in the GO have lost the ability to sign up for another GO, and they’re basically just out of luck now. So anytime you cancel a set, you become less reliable and people will be less likely to join with you in the future. People, reasonably, want a guarantee. 

But there were sets where if we didn’t cancel, I’d be covering up to 8 cards in the set, and usually those 8 cards represented one or two members. In particular, this comeback we struggled to fill Wooyoung and San spots, and there were many sets where I covered all 4 of the Wooyoungs guaranteed to prio.

Where priority went wrong

During Crazy Form, our priority chat was very successful. We had 32 claims in the chat: enough for a guaranteed 4 sets. Because it was so successful, and because we added fixed claims this comeback (most of whom came out of our Crazy Form prio chat), we decided to keep the same amount of prio claims this comeback. 

In hindsight, we shouldn’t have done that. 

The way our priority chat is supposed to work is that your claim is guaranteed. So if you’re in our chat, we will get you your prio claim member for any GO you want to join. 

In theory, and in practice in the past, this allows us to gauge the interest of our joiners. If we don’t have a lot of claims from our prio group, we know not to open a large GO. If everything gets claimed immediately, then we know we can probably open an extra set for non prio joiners. 

Our problem, though, was Jongho. Every Jongho joiner in our prio group wanted Jongho for almost every card. And I get it. His cards are perfect. I know. But if every Jongho card is claimed, then that means we’re on the hook for opening for the full 6 sets (2 for fixed, 4 for prio).  

And what would inevitably happen is we’d have all Jongho’s claimed, and then only handful of the other 32 cards we needed claimed. So we were on the hook for getting 12-20 claims filled each time we posted outside of the people who already regularly join our GOs. So like, that’s a lot of new joiners we needed to bring in per GO, and I already mentioned how few people we actually get to join when we post a GO. 

And we just couldn’t do it. 

The problem, which maybe smarter people would have foreseen, is what we have coined as the feralness gap. Some people in our prio chat were just much more feral than others, and unfortunately for us the people who were feral tended to cluster around certain members. We rarely had Jongho or Yunho available, but we almost always had Mingi, San, and Wooyoung. 

Like I said, we have no requirement for people to join a certain number of GOs in our priority chat. The assumption is that if you’ve joined the chat, you know that you want to join a lot but not all of the GOs. Basically, you’re a serious collector, you just want more freedom to pass on a handful of sets. 

But that is definitely not how some people used the priority chat, and I don’t begrudge them that. We all do what we have to do for our own collections, but I just want to explain our perspective. 

I’ll give an extreme example. Because our priority chat is supposed to be guaranteed, a couple of people used it as a protection claim. If their favorite GOM wasn’t opening or the GOM they had a semi-fixed claim wasn’t opening, they would fall back on our GO. Obviously that works well for them. But it hurts us a lot as we’re trying to fill the GO for everyone else. 

We delay posting our GOs, meaning we delay the opportunity to get joiners, by letting our prio chat have the form several hours before we share it anywhere else. Once we are finally sharing it on Instagram, a lot of people have already made their claims with someone else, and we have an uphill battle to try to fulfill these guaranteed spots for the joiners who are with us because they’re relying on us. 

The other, more common example, is just one of degrees and related to the feralness gap with how many events ATEEZ has. A person could’ve joined 20 GOs with us during Golden Hour, which seems like a lot—definitely enough to consider themselves priority. But given that 20 isn’t even a third of the events, it’s not as many as it appears. 

Ultimately, it turned out untenable and everyone in our priority chat suffered because we didn’t even make it through the POB period before we had to come, hat in hand, and tell them claims wouldn’t be guaranteed anymore. We could not continue to open up enough sets for everyone in our prio claims to claim their member. 

This was actually really, really hard on us. We have grown very close to many of our prio joiners, and I think both of us consider most of them our friends at this point. We wanted to be able to get them their cards, and it sucked that we just couldn’t do it. 

So why didn’t you do the whole math thing? 

I think this will sound crazy to literally anyone who wasn’t experiencing what I was experiencing, but I genuinely didn’t have time. 

Running GOs takes a significant amount of my time on a good day. We have set up our systems in a way that GOs will ideally be the least disruptive to my other responsibilities as possible. So adding a whole new system when I was already overwhelmed with the amount of things we were ordering felt like a bridge too far. 

Keep in mind that the preorder period had around 20 GOs, and we only had a handful of GOs that were actually full. 

So in order to do math, I was looking at reaching out to at least 15 GOs worth of people, and most of these GOs were for 48 POBs, so a not insignificant amount of people. I needed to gather my receipts so I could show the math per GO, pull the email addresses for each joiner, and then send batch emails based on GO with a total each joiner owed, and then verify and track that these 80+ people did in fact send me the money. 

The thing that complicated it even further is that many people were in several GOs, which meant they would be getting several emails from me if I emailed by GO, and I would need to track their total to ensure they sent me the money for each GO and that I recorded it in the right place. 

All of this would be totally possible to do and track and manage… if running GOs was my full time job that I got paid for. But it’s not. 

I say this with all the kindness in the world, but I have a life outside of helping other people get their PCs. 

I was also cognizant of the fact that our fixed joiners would be paying a lot as they were in every single one of our unfilled GOs. Which, I’m sorry, but that does feel bad. It’s not their fault we couldn’t get joiners to fill the GOs. 

So to me, the amount of work and effort required to get this $400 back was just not worth staying up late or taking time away from my other responsibilities or, you know, life. 

I know that technically it was my choice to cover those cards, and that technically it was also my choice to not do math and request an additional payment for the unclaimed cards, but I hope people can understand how it didn’t feel like much of a choice at all at the time. 

What about all those fancalls?

One of the things I am most proud of is that we helped at least 13 other people talk to ATEEZ this comeback either through fancall raffles or being a proxy for their entry. 

Honestly, it was great to help that many people. I think in total ATEEZ did 19  fancalls this comeback, give or take a couple. We tried to host as many raffles as we were able to given our own schedules, and then I entered 3 fancalls, and Cassandra entered 1 and the in person fansign. 

We only lost 2 of our fancall entries out of all the ones entered, one for Seonghwa and one for Mingi, both for raffle winners. And although I know it’s not our fault, it still feels absolutely horrible to enter someone and not have them win. 

And despite the good news, fancall raffles are really the start of where things began to go sideways for us. 

We learned last comeback that we should do fancall raffles at the beginning of the comeback when the entry time is longer and put ourselves in for a fancall when we didn’t have the time to do a raffle. Which is what we did. We raffled off almost every single one of the originally announced fancalls. The two exceptions were I entered myself for Hellolive because Hellolive does not allow proxy entries (some GOMs did try to raffle this off, and there was a lot of drama with Hellolive not allowing the winners to participate) and we had someone who had lost one of our earlier fancall raffles proxy for Everline 2 (this means they entered themselves and we bought our sets from them at a discount). 

So here’s the issue with fancall raffles: we want the winner of the fancall raffle to win the fancall. If we are doing a fancall raffle, we will continue to open sets as long as they’re getting claimed, trying to get the best chance possible for our joiner. These GOs are usually triple the size of a normal GO, and usually double the size of our own fancall entries. 

So prior to the comeback even happening, we had committed ourselves to around 8 absolutely huge GOs on top of the other 12 mid-size GOs we were running. 

It’s not hard to set up a GO, create the masterlist pages, buy the albums, etc. Opening for GOs is easy. Even when they’re large. 

The trouble comes with fulfilling them. 

So we had an absolutely insane amount of items arriving at our kaddy. My kaddy has always been incredibly reliable and quick. 

Not this comeback.

They made several mistakes (as did we, which I’ll detail later), and I do attribute that to the amount of ATEEZ stuff they had arriving in their warehouse. For a while, they even stopped taking new customers. And I won’t say that all of that was me because of course it wasn’t. But it didn’t help that they were having to open orders with 100s of albums and unbox all of those for me or that I was requesting purchases every other day or that 5-6 packages were arriving for me a night. 

This was also a problem for us. I would wake up every morning with 30 missed messages from my kaddy. I was also having to request they send me $600 boxes every other day for multiple weeks in order to avoid warehouse fees. At one point, I had covered almost $2,000 in EMS fees and we hadn’t sent out a single group order. I have never been more stressed about money in my life, given the amount of unclaimed PCs I was covering and the EMS fees I was paying up front. I started to dread looking at my savings account because I knew I wouldn’t like what I saw. 

And all of these boxes needing to get shipped to my house, the fancall raffle GOs arriving at the kaddy, more GOs and fancalls still being dropped: all of it coincided with ATEEZ’s concert. 

My friends, and possibly other people, know that I was out of town for 2 weeks during the concerts. I spent a week vacationing with my family in LA, and then another week traveling for the concerts. 

At some point, I was at Disneyland, literally standing in line for the millennium falcon ride praying that some other GOM would be opening for the just announced fancall set so that I didn’t have to figure out what to do with it: I had no time to hold a raffle; I had no money to give a discount and host for myself (not that I even wanted to); and it all felt really, really dire. 

Wait, how much? 

So obviously, there was a lot going on. Fancalls and the fancall raffles were a source of our stress and issues, but just in general, there were a lot of items ordered. 

We ran 70 GOs just for Golden Hour which amounted to around 3,700 albums. During this time, we also ran a GO for Yeosang’s bday book, San’s wallet, Mingi’s LP, every nacific, some of the soundwave merch, some of the atiny fanmeet merch, and we were of course still fulfilling the first batch of aniteez (which I will detail more when I get to the mistakes and issues section). 

I have already disclosed that I spent over $1,000 covering unclaimed POBs and album cards, not including any cards I covered in my own fancall attempts. You can see how, in 70 GOs with an average cost of around $12 per pob, even one unfilled claim per GO would add up. In fact, if all 70 GOs had only one unclaimed member with an average price of $12, I would’ve spent $840. Obviously I spent more than that. 

And this is outside of my own collecting, which cost me a sizable amount of money on my own. Because I did in fact get Jongho from every GO. I also got the birthday merch. And the soundwave merch. And so on. 

When we get a box shipped to the U.S. from our kaddy, the price ranges from about $300-600, depending on what’s in the box. POBs that came with full size albums are always more expensive because we have to pay a fee per album for the kaddy to dispose of the album after removing the inclusions. That’s a fee we have to pay regardless of whether joiners wanted their inclusions or not. 

For each POB a joiner gets, they do pay a portion of this fee. If they also get inclusions, they pay the whole fee. But if they don’t get inclusions, I pay it out of pocket and I don’t make it back unless I can convince someone down the line to purchase those album PCs. It sounds easy in theory, but the box of Outlaw album PCs we haven’t been able to sell says otherwise. 

So that money adds up too. It might be just .75 per album card set. But assume out of our 3,7000 albums that at least 1,500 were an album or a digipak where we had to pay this fee. That would mean that I personally paid $1,125 to get album PCs sent to me for the privilege of having to take time out of whatever else I need to do to try to sell them. 

That’s… a lot. 

What’s so hard about shipping people their stuff? 

I don’t know how all GOMs do things, but Cassandra and I do things a certain way. 

Once we know what GOs will be shipped out in a batch, we start combining all of those GOs into one spreadsheet broken down by joiner. We do this by exporting our current GO pages into a new spreadsheet. 

We can then reorganize the spreadsheet by joiner so that we can calculate how much each individual joiner owes us in EMS. We also use this spreadsheet to create packing receipts, which help ensure we correctly package their items and let joiners quickly see what’s in there at a glance. 

Once we’ve done all that, we take the new spreadsheet and reload it to our masterlist as a list of names. For each person who joins, we copy and paste the list of all of their items from across the 15-25 GOs in the batch into a table on that person's page. 

Once that person’s order is packaged, we take a picture of the items and add it to that person’s page on the masterlist. 

There are a lot of reasons we take pictures of people’s claims. One, because we are human and make mistakes, especially given the quantity of items and GOs that we are dealing with. This process adds several checks for us. We can check that the packing receipt has the same listed items as the person’s masterlist page; we can check that we did include everything on the packing receipt; and the joiner can check our work. If something is wrong, it gets caught before send out, which means this mistake didn’t cost anyone extra money in shipping. 

The other reason we do it is for joiners. We think it gives them some security to know what items are arriving especially given the amount of GOs we host and that some of our joiners join. They may not remember what KNpops LD 1 is by name, but if there is a picture, then they know. It also offers some sort of proof that we not only have items on hand—we have their items on hand. 

And finally, while it’s not something I worry about often, it offers both Cassandra and I some level of protection against false claims. 

As these pictures are being taken, we weigh items and calculate a shipping cost. That way, when we reach out to joiners for shipping, all parts of the process are done. Joiners simply need to fill out the address request form, pay their EMS and domestic shipping, and we can turn around items very quickly from there. 

This is one of the reasons that fancall raffles become an issue for us. 

There is a small, but not insignificant, portion of fancall raffle joiners who are not interested in PCs at all or have only a small amount of interest. That’s totally fine. But it does mean that when we have a fancall raffle, we will often get about 10 joiners per fancall raffle that only sign up for the 1 GO. 

I am so super grateful to anyone who joins any of our GOs even if they only join the 1. So the reason I say it’s an issue is not because we mind if people only join 1 GO: it’s because the process we’ve developed doesn’t really serve people who joined 1 GO. 

We send in batches. This means we usually will get several boxes from our kaddy across a couple of weeks, and then combine them into one send out. 

It feels really bad to come across a person who has joined 1 GO and know that they won’t be getting their stuff for several more weeks because we are still sorting the rest of the batch. I feel bad, but there’s nothing I can do about it. I can’t take them out of the processes we’ve created because that risks messing something up along the way, and it creates more work for us. 

Right now, shipping is mostly finished over a week each month. If we tried to send out people’s items as we finished packing each GO instead of as we finished packing each batch, I would be constantly engaged with the send out process. That means individually contacting people for payments, address checks, post office trips every day. 

Neither of us have the ability to be constantly working on this, and it would slow other send-outs down considerably. We organize it the way we organize it because it is what works for us, which is important too. 

So the sort of issue is that are systems are inefficient for joiners who only join 1 GO, but the majority of our joiners join a lot, so changing our systems doesn’t really fix anything for us.

I said earlier that for each batch send out, we upload the names of all of our joiners to a new batch masterlist page. Then we individually fill out the information for each joiner. 

Our last batch had 90 joiners. That’s a lot of people. And it takes us the exact same time to create the batch pages for a person who joins 10 GOs in a batch as it does for someone who joins 1 GO in a batch. 

Issues and Mistakes (aka the things that keep me up at night and a toktoq #dwayor)

Aniteez took years off of my life. It started when aniteez dropped in February—even just placing the orders was a challenge because of the weight limits on toktoq. So we ended up placing 20 separate orders, which is a lot to track. 

Things starting arriving to the kaddy in May, right before Golden Hour began shipping but during the time we were needing to open GOs and organize orders for the POB period. 

One of our boxes was marked as delivered on toktoq but never arrived at the kaddy. I already mentioned that our kaddy was very overwhelmed during this period. A lot of people’s aniteez orders were messed up, which meant the kaddy was doing tons of unboxing videos and sorting these messed up orders. It was taking them 5+ days to go through orders, and basically all sites have a complaint window of 7 days. So this was Really Scary for a lot of GOMs. 

Right before the end of the 7 days, I reached out to check on this missing box. Our kaddy told me that it had been delivered, but they had sent it back because it had a shipping label for me and a shipping label for another person on the same box. 

I… didn’t know what to do with this. I was really annoyed that they hadn’t told me immediately, honestly. But I also understand that this was a new situation for them too, and that they were also struggling with the amount of messed up aniteez orders. (During this time we also had 3 separate orders arrive without pobs, which meant I had to contact toktoq for those as well.) 

But I dutifully contacted toktoq about the box that had been returned to them with $240 worth of items in it. I sent them a picture of the box with 2 shipping labels on it; I explained the situation; and then I waited. For a week, I heard nothing. 

So I sent them another message. 

And I heard nothing. 

This went on for at least two more messages. 

In the meantime, they had contacted me back about the orders with the missing pobs almost immediately and promised to send those. Which.. hadn’t arrived yet.  

And while I was still waiting for them to respond to my, at this point, many, many messages about my missing aniteez box, the POB orders for Golden Hour began arriving. 

Which were also messed up, so I contacted them about being shorted POBs in several orders. Which they also promised to fix. And I was of course still waiting on the missing aniteez POBs. 

Finally, almost 6 weeks after my initial message, toktoq got back to me about my missing box. They agreed it was their fault, and they said they would fix it. I was obviously overjoyed. This would get fixed. Not anytime soon, based on the amount of messed up order items I was waiting on, but it would get fixed. 

I heard nothing from them about tracking numbers. Or when to expect items. But I also knew the situation they’d gotten themselves into. I wasn’t the only GOM with messed up orders. GOMs all over Twitter and instagram were complaining. And I had been contacting toktoq twice a week for several weeks now. So I decided to wait it out for a bit. 

A couple of weeks after they agreed to fix the issue, a lone Sandeoki doll arrived at the kaddy. Since I had not placed an order for this Sandeoki, I assumed it was part of my missing box and the other 8 items would be arriving soon. The box itself had a packing list that said it only should have a Sandeoki in it, and the weight on the box confirmed that was the only thing in the box. So honestly, I wasn’t worried about this box, and neither was the kaddy. They didn’t send me the unboxing video and deleted it because the box had the item it was supposed to have in it and everything with the item was correct. 

A couple of weeks later, no other boxes had arrived. So I contacted toktoq. They very happily informed me they had sent all 9 missing items in the box with Sandeoki—they were done with this order. I messaged toktoq everyday for almost two weeks about this order because I had proof that nothing but Sandeoki had ever been in that box. The shipping label has the weight on it, and in the missing items included 2 other full sized dolls plus a Halateez outfit. There is just literally no way they could’ve ever put anything else in this tiny box they sent me. 

But still they fought me. And eventually, I just couldn’t do it anymore. I refunded those joiners, and I decided to seek recourse through PayPal instead since I had ample proof toktoq never sent me these 8 items. 

So the aniteez drama lingered over the length of the comeback. Starting when items shipped in May until the first week in September when it finally came to a close because I decided it had to. I couldn’t do it anymore. 

That was issue number one this comeback, but for sure the stress of dealing with that and the time devoted to it played a part in the two mistakes I made this comeback that were ultimately my fault. 

The first was, of course, another toktoq order. We had opened for all versions of the toktoq pobs, and these GOs had a lot of OT8 claims, so there were a lot of orders. Tons of toktoq orders arrived at the kaddy during June and I think into July. 

For one of our poca orders, they sent us the poca album with the platform pobs. And I simply didn’t notice. I do check all orders that arrive to the kaddy, but usually what I’m checking is that the number is correct. Does the number match the number on the order number, and does the number of pobs match the number of albums? Truthfully, it didn’t cross my mind to make sure we had received the correct POB. 

We didn’t notice the mistake until we were trying to sort the cards and we didn’t have enough. So I went through the kaddy’s pictures trying to figure out what happened because I had recorded how many we purchased, and it should have been enough. But yet here we were, without enough. 

Ultimately, this is my fault. We didn’t notice until it was too late which meant there was no way to fix it. We did the best we could to sort this GO, giving up some of our own claims, and then I refunded to those people who we couldn’t fill or offered them an exchange with a higher priced card. Everyone was so super nice and understanding about this, and I cannot tell you how much I appreciate that. But it felt bad to have messed up what amounted to about 5 people’s orders plus our own. 

The other mistake is also on me. We decided to do a small GO for the silver card POBs. I requested that the kaddy purchase the order on June 9th, which may have been the day it went on sale, and then sent them the money, around $400, just a couple of hours later as soon as they told me the price. 

Often I interact with my kaddy right before bed and right when I wake up, and June 9th was no exception. Both of those messages and the money were sent around 11:00 PM my time. When I woke up, there were messages from my kaddy waiting for me, including requests regarding inclusions and arrivals. So I replied to those awaiting messages. But I didn’t verify that they had purchased the silver card. 

And unfortunately, they hadn’t. I didn’t realize until I saw other people getting their silver cards in the mail, and we hadn’t gotten anything. I logged on to ask the kaddy if they could check on the order, and it was discovered the order had never been placed, and I had just $400 sitting… somewhere… with our kaddy. They added it as a credit to my account because they don’t give refunds, and then I refunded the joiners out of pocket. 

Our kaddy not placing an order has never happened before, but as I mentioned, the time when all of this happened wasn’t just hard on us—they were busy too. They were working hard on other things for me at the very time when this went down, and I’m not their only customer. Besides, ultimately, I should’ve verified that the order had been placed, so it is on me. 

I’m sure I made other mistakes this comeback too because I’m a human and humans make mistakes. But those are the ones that felt really bad because really, they couldn’t be fixed. When I look at the mistakes objectively, I know they’re relatively small. I didn’t check to make sure we got the right pob when we got the right number of cards; I didn’t check that an order had been placed when our kaddy had never not placed an order before. Both are the type of mistakes that involve me not anticipating the mistake of someone else. But I cannot go back in time and replace the lost opportunities for those joiners who were counting on me, and if I had paid more attention, if I had done more, perhaps those mistakes might not have happened. 

But the truth is that I couldn’t do more. I did all that I could during Golden Hour, and perhaps going forward, we have to figure out how we can start doing less. 

So what now? 

Quitting the GOM life was on the table after this comeback. We very seriously talked about it. Is this bringing us joy? Why are we doing this? Can we do it in a better way? 

And I think both of us want to continue, but we want it to be more joyful again. We want our own collections to be joyful, and we want being in the community to be a joyful experience. Both of those things are important to us. 

People close to us know that we have struggled with the GOM discourse, and we even wrote about it during Crazy Form. It can suck to devote so much time and love to something and have a small but vocal portion of the community think you’re not a person deserving of basic respect. 

Even when the GOM discourse isn’t directed at us, it still sucks to read the 30th complaint in a week about how all GOMs are using their joiners for winner benefits, fancalls, Polaroids, etc. Or to read another take about how GOMs are making money and overcharging for things when I know that I am personally bleeding money. 

And while so many of our joiners are so kind and lovely, there are a handful who are… not. There’s just no other way to say it.  And it sucks to deal with. One bad joiner can waste literal hours and 100 spiritual hours of a GOMs time. 

The work is often thankless and invisible, and when the outward discourse of GOMs is so negative, it can feel even more so. 

And that’s part of the reason Cassandra and I so seriously considered quitting after this comeback. For a while—I actually don’t know if they’re still around—but for a while, I had a whole anti on Twitter stalking me over my fancalls, and it is like.. am I doing all of this… for this? 

Another thing that weighs on me personally—I don’t think Cassandra has this particular struggle—is that it is easy to feel like there is a portion of people who are using me. I am, quite famously (and ridiculously), hated on Twitter for being a fan of Eden, which is fine. But the part that bums me out is that there are small GOMs and BST accounts who have me blocked on Twitter because of that but still interact with me and want to trade with me on Instagram. And there are people who don’t interact with, follow, or talk to me at all except to message me to ask for advice on fancalls or ask how they can get into an in person fansign. I just think that kind of sucks. 

But. That’s the point. There’s a lot that kinda sucks. But at one point, this brought us a lot of joy, and there are still so many things about the community and hobby that bring us joy. 

So we want to make some changes that will hopefully help us find our joy again.  

Changes coming to prio and last call

The writing was probably on the wall, but the biggest change is that our priority chat will look different. Without requiring people to join a certain amount of GOs, we just don’t have enough control over this chat, and it causes us too many delays to posting our GOs to try to get other joiners. 

Going forward, we will combine our priority chat with our last call chat. Perhaps it will be called first dibs chat. We will send the form to the chat first, but it will be posted online immediately after. It will be a bigger chat than our priority chat was because we will not be guaranteeing claims to anyone in it anymore. 

This does not mean we will not be doing member claims. We will be doing member claims. But we are not guaranteeing enough sets for anyone outside of our fixed chat. 

The other change we will be making is that we will not secure multiple sets with unclaimed members across sets. 

For example, if we have 3 open sets and only 1 claim for Hongjoong and Seonghwa across those sets, the third set will be canceled automatically even if all the other spots are full. Neither Cassandra or I want to be in the position where we are covering multiples of the same member again. The decision for whether the second set will also be canceled because of the two open claims would be made on a case by case basis. 

We understand that these changes affect our priority joiners the most, and that our chat for the next comeback may feel a little different. Our priority chat has always felt a bit like a small family to me, but going forward it will probably be more formal in tone since it will be bigger. 

But any joiner is welcome to join our general trades and chatting group chat, so if you would also like a more casual atmosphere where you can ask questions of other collectors, we can also add you there. 

While we won’t be able to guarantee priority claims anymore, we have attempted to, and we will continue to attempt to find ways to, create other benefits for our joiners. We will continue to offer album PCs at cost and first dibs on leftover inclusions. 

We won’t be changing anything about our send out process, so we will still provide images of your items and do individual address checks. We did start doing batch send out group chats this comeback, and we will likely continue to do so going forward as this makes providing joiners with reminders and updates about filling out the form much easier, though we will continue to make all other GO updates via our masterlist and will continue to be a DM away if joiners have any concerns or questions. 

And we will continue to work hard to do the best we can for all of our joiners, no matter how many GOs they join with us. 

Changes coming to fixed 

We will also be expanding our fixed claims. Right now, we would like to open an additional two sets at least, and we will be posting for joiners for those sets soon. 

Something that we did and would like to do more of are fixed claim only fancall raffles. These have several benefits to us personally. First, it allows us to be more casual about picking a winner. We can screen record and send a message to the chat that we’re going to pick a winner, and then send them the video afterwards. That means we don’t have to find time to go live. 

Second, it solves the problem of having a ton of huge GOs from fancall raffles where we have a bunch of joiners who have only claimed one card across one GO. (This isn’t to say we wouldn’t do any general raffles, but just that the numbers might be reversed. Instead of mostly general raffles with 3-4 fixed only, we’d do mostly fixed raffles with 1-2 large, general raffle GOs.) 

Third, we are aware that our fixed joiners, for the most part, are joining in all of our attempts. This is a way to thank them. It also allows us to put forward the biggest collectors for these fancalls since these fancalls are about selling albums, and our fixed claim joiners are buying a lot of albums. In a way, I think it will make the fancalls feel more like a community effort for our fixed joiners. 

The problem with fixed only fancall raffles is that it can be harder to get outside joiners because they don’t have a chance at the fancall and we’re charging full price for the POB. (It’s easier to get joiners for fancall attempts if you give a discount because a lot of GOMs do. So people don’t want to pay full price when they don’t have to.) 

In an ideal world, we would like to have a fixed claim group that is big enough that we have a chance to win fancalls for our joiners with only fixed + one extra set. It’s still not the best chance at winning a fancall, but it’s a reasonable chance. And that’s really all we can do. Cassandra and I rarely enter our own fancalls with more than 40 albums, so if we could give a similar chance to our fixed people, that would be great. 

We have tried to give as many benefits as possible to our fixed joiners, and we will continue to do so. This comeback, we gave them all the full set of album, digi, poca, and platform cards for their members. We have tried to find them good deals where possible, and we have given them priority sorting in some of the GOs that have benefits for ordering more. 

I don’t know what we will do in the future as I think it’s really comeback specific what opportunities present themselves, but we will continue to try to find ways to thank our fixed joiners for joining us on this journey. 

So if you or anyone you know is interested in a fixed claim, please send them our way. 😉