Evgeny Hontor 

Together with another awesome artist, Rozalin-da, we're creating a Skibidi-themed booth at IndieCon (an event dedicated to indie games, animation, and so on, which will take place on August 15 in Moscow). It's a big responsibility, and we're really worried!! But it's also a great joy and a celebration for me personally.

The booth concept is a photo zone + art exhibition + quests and other activities. The stand will feature the original series, fanmades, and Rozalin-da and I's alternate universes.

We have a lot of work ahead of us, and, unfortunately, quite a lot of material costs. We MAY be able to partially recoup these costs, but, first and foremost, this is a non-commercial event.

✅ Participation fee and booth space - 20,000 rub (approximately $280)

We've finalized the contract with the Post and will be sending out the first batch of test parcels in a few days. If everything goes smoothly—meaning nothing gets stuck or returned—we’ll ship the rest and won’t have to cause any more delays! I really hope this whole mess comes to an end. We are so tired of feeling unreliable and having to hold up orders. It’s truly unpleasant for everyone involved, and sometimes it just makes you want to give up.
 
I explained earlier why we hadn’t signed an agreement with the postal service sooner.

Tomorrow, we’re going to sign a contract with the postal service so we stop delaying shipments.
 
Why we didn’t do this sooner:
Back before everything went wrong—when I had an Etsy shop—we had an official contract with Russian Post. Under the terms, all services had to be prepaid (we’d transfer funds to the account first, and only then ship the parcels). However, we kept getting hit with strange charges; Russian Post wouldn't provide any justification for them yet still demanded payment. Sometimes the amounts were huge. On one occasion, they even demanded payment for parcels that had already been paid for and shipped six months prior!

Naturally, I was dead set against losing money to unexpected charges like that again.
But since customs has started returning parcels more frequently, we’re losing money anyway—and delaying shipments to avoid sending too many at once. We can’t go on like this. It’s better to deal with the occasional random extra charge than to leave orders unshipped for weeks or have to resend them because of the whims of customs.

I just hope the losses won't be too steep. I hope we won't have to raise shipping costs because of this!

Here's a little video from the last market. I'm not really good at video, but I like how my booth looked this time. What do you think?