Showing up for work at Chessex Manufacturing, in Berkeley, California, in the mid-90s, was exactly the kind of adventure I thought I should be having in my twenties. I’d moved far enough away from my comfort zone that everything was noticeably different. There used to be a tourism slogan: “Texas. It’s like a whole other country.” When we stopped using that phrase, we should have gifted it to California, because every day was like waking up on one of Neptune’s moons.
They were just…different from us. Not in any obvious way; it was a mindset, or maybe an attitude (and yeah, I know, I know, I can hear what that sounds like, okay? I’m not oblivious to the fact that the exact same thing could be said about us…and was.)
This was not helped by the fact that Weldon and I share a brain. We used to refer to ourselves as Earth-1 and Earth-2 because, aside from a slight age difference, and different clothing and appearances, we were functionally the same person. This made it very easy to live with and worth with Weldon, because we could finish each other’s sentences, we knew all of the in-jokes and references of the other person, and we also shared a similar sensibility about most things, creative and otherwise.
Me being in Berkeley was a big help to Weldon, but it made us difficult to deal with. We were a voting blockade on creative decisions and more than once, things got heated in the Monday meeting. Mostly, it was garden variety office politics, but every once in a while, we found ourselves in a needless argument over the dumb stuff that we were dispatched to put the kibosh on.
Magic Wand Paints
Back in the 90s, the dominant power in miniature wargaming was Games Workshop, and they were pretty universally disliked across the board at the retail level and distribution, too. They were difficult to deal with, expensive for both retailers and consumers, and set up to gouge their customers by retooling the various factions in Warhammer to make them the new, “tournament legal” armies to play with, until six months from now when another faction gets a boost and players have to buy all new stuff to keep current. If that sounds kinda like what collectible card games do these days *Cough*magicthegathering*Cough* that’s because they learned it from Games Workshop.
And get this: Games Workshop was only too happy for retailers to buy their stuff from them…at an exorbitantly small discount. So small, in fact, that retailers would have to charge more for models and games in order to make any money. But hey! If you lived near an actual GW retail store, you could get all of their stuff, at the proper retail price! What great guys they were! Someone, I think Don himself, might have negotiated a more favorable percentage for Chessex Distribution, but it was still less than 50%. We had to list all of their stuff at a net cost (I think it worked out to 40% off retail).
Their dominance in the miniatures marketplace extended into accessories, such as Citadel paints—still considered the gold standard by so many wargamers. Chessex had its own paint line, called Magic Wand Paints, and they were really good—maybe not superior to Citadel paints, but certainly comparable. It was a good product, less expensive than the competition, but no one really knew about it, such was Citadel’s hold on the marketplace. One of the ways we could slap them back was by selling the Magic Wand paint line at a reasonable price point. Weldon came up with a great slogan for the paint: “Because your Distributor Should Never be your Competitor.” Boom, sucka!
To make matters worse, we had something of a control problem. The original paintmaster had left, and his apprentice was having a ball coming up with new versions of blue and green—his favorite colors. There were, I think, like seven different shades of both. It wasn’t really a coherent line of paints. Before I had arrived, it became necessary to fire the apprentice, after they found out he’d moved some pallets around in the back corner of the warehouse and was living there. Cot, hot plate, a couple of books, you name it. He also had something of a substance abuse problem and so it became necessary to fire him and move him and his accoutrements out. The new apprentice was his helper. He did not have a substance abuse problem, and so we were off to the races.
The first thing Weldon did was to organize the colors. He re-numbered them to be consistent and ensure that similar paints were in the same number range. He made a chart, using the paints, grouped along color and shade: colors, neutrals, metallics. He even designed a paint rack for retailers who order a starter kit, filled with the most popular and useful paints. It was very nice, and comparable to the Citadel line. Now, all we needed was consumers to buy it.
The first thing Weldon came up with was a starter kit: three paints and a mini to paint so that people could try Magic Wand out for themselves. He presented the idea to our boss, who balked at the idea of spending money on miniatures. No problem, said Weldon, we’ll get the mini companies to give us minis in exchange for a plug. “Babe, no one is going to go for that,” our boss said.
One thing that Weldon and I have in common is that we hate people telling us what we can and cannot do, especially when it came to stuff like this. Weldon went away and called Reaper (a Texas company that he had a contact in) and he explained the idea to them, and they said “hell yes” before he’d finished the pitch. Come to think of it, a lot of the products Weldon came up with were a result of someone in the office going, “We can’t do that!” Hold my dice bag, chum.
I don’t remember how many starter kits we made, but they were grouped around the minis themselves. A bone color scheme for the skeleton, green paints for the goblin, etc. We wrote some simple instructions, talking about applying the base color first, and then thinning the darker color to create a wash, and then dry brushing the lighter color over the raised areas. Pre-YouTube, when people had to read stuff.
The starter kits were priced right—basically the cost of the three paints. We used minimal packaging, a wrap around cardboard sleeve on three sides, shrink wrapped to the bottles. It looked nice, and really showed off the paint colors. Ral Partha also sent minis for us; it turned out all of those miniatures companies had tons of spare minis lying around, doing nothing (surprise, surprise). These kits sold out and were very popular.
This led Weldon to come up with his next big idea: a six-color paint set, using basic shades, neutrals, and metallics. This time, no one said anything contrary.
Well, almost.
Our production manager was a guy named Joseph. He was probably my age, give or take. He was a very nice guy, and he was pretty good at his job, which was making schedules and pricing out components. But Joseph had this very annoying habit of wanting to put his two cents in wherever he could, and he’d float an idea out, any idea that came into his head, and then he’d plant his flag and prepare to die on that hill. That way, Joseph could point to whatever change he’d made in a project to justify his existence; a tangible way that he could prove he had contributed to the process.
The Monday Meeting
We’re going over the status on all of our projects, which changed from week to week. Weldon was showing everyone his six color sets, wherein he explained his rationale and his desire to keep it simple at first, and then if these sets went over, expanding into other color schemes. “We can produce a Flesh set,” he pointed out, “since we have exactly six flesh tones from pale to dark. It’s perfect,” he added. “We can sell this to the historical wargamers, since they need flesh tones for all of their soldiers.”
Joseph’s eyes lit up. “You can include Ork Flesh!”
Three decades ago, orks weren’t sexy. They were green. Our ork flesh paint was a deep, rich, swampy green, closer to bluish rather than yellowish. It was a good green. But it was not neutral flesh color. It was, and I cannot overstate this, green.
When Joseph suggested that the green Ork Flesh paint be included in the beige-brown-neutral Flesh Set, it was as if the needle scratched across the record. Weldon took a beat (to his credit) and said, “Well, not that one, since it’s green, and this would be a flesh colored set.”
“But Ork Flesh is a flesh color,” Joseph pointed out.
“But it’s green,” Weldon said.
“But we call it Ork Flesh. Therefore, it’s a Flesh,” said Joseph, now fully committed to his premise. “It says ‘flesh’ right on the label.”
“It’s not really a flesh color. We call it ‘ork flesh’ because it’s a shade of green you can use to paint orks with. It’s not really a flesh color,” said Weldon, now well into a slow burn.
“I’m not trying to be difficult, here,” said Joseph. Weldon shot me a look and I had to bite my lip to keep from laughing. “But it’s called ‘Ork Flesh’ and…” he looked around the table, hoping for a sympathetic eye. There was none.
The idea that Joseph didn’t think he was being difficult was too much for Weldon, who kinda snapped and said, “Okay, where do you think this ork flesh should go in the kit?” He indicated the line up of all the paints he’d assembled as a prototype, which were arranged from light to dark. “Joseph, if you put a green paint in this beige line up, it’s going to look stupid. We’re going to look stupid.”
“I don’t see how!” Joseph knew he was in an argument at this point and he was certain he had no idea how he’d gotten there.
This went back and forth a few times, each time increasing in volume, until at last, Weldon could take no more. “Okay,” he said, all pretense of composure gone, “you go outside and if you can find me one person with this color of skin, I’ll put it in the flesh kit!” He waved the jar of Ork Flesh around emphatically.
Our boss came in shortly thereafter and concluded the meeting, as our “spirited conversation” was audible throughout the office. We won the day, in the end, and the six-color paint sets did very well, too. And no one ever called us out on our flagrant omission of Ork Flesh in the Flesh set. But that argument was indicative of our time there; a tremendous amount of drama and slap-fights over dumb stuff like that.
Weldon’s best idea was one that never came to pass. He designed a square box for four paints that could be opened and reassembled into a small building to be used as terrain on the table. It would have meant printing graphics and all of that, and our charge at the time was to sell what we had, not make new stuff, unless it was new stuff that they wanted.
We produced the Magic Wand rack and starter set and ran an ad in Dragon Magazine (we had bought a year’s worth of one page ads) and all was well…until the law was passed stating that we had to label anything deemed to be a choking hazard, potentially toxic, or even just dangerous. There was already some blowback about naming the speckled dice, which looked like candy already, after food, like Candy Corn, Blueberry, Icing, Squash, Lemon, Mint, etc. Our paint was the other critical issue and we needed to protect ourselves from possible litigation. This involved first sending our paint off to be tested. It was made with base, pigments, and distilled water, but who knows how that would affect someone who pounded an ounce of Black Primer like a shot of Jägermeister?
When the tests came back, it was about what we expected; the paint was not really safe to drink. I remember Weldon spending about an hour on the phone with Kathy, the company lawyer, trying to design a sticker we could put on the paint bottles. At one point in the conversation, Weldon said, “How do they even test for something like that? ‘Here, suck on this paint brush, will you? Oh, look, he died? We’d better write that down.’”
It took some doing and some tightening of the language but we ended up with the smallest possible warning label we could devise. It just wasn’t small enough. In fact, the sticker was so big that it wrapped around the entire jar of paint! So much for being able to see the nice colors. Weldon’s favorite line on the label was “May cause death in humans.” I’m sure Orks would have been fine.