Cast of Characters
- Ken Adams: Chief Executive Owns the Place
- Adam Bowles: Tech Man Sr.
- Alberto Muñoz: Generally Manages
- Abel Jacoby: Tech Man Jr.
- Dan Zalewski III: Marketing/Comms + Tech Team + Bogles
- Andrew Gould: Shipping Man Sr. and Yugioh Inventory
- Kyle Kratzer: Shipping Man Jr. and Poke Inventory
- Mark Fleischood: MTG Singles Inventory Pro
- Rob Osle: Storefront Inventory Manager Pallet Master
- Kody Blouch: Warehouse Man Sr.
- Jeff Okrasinski: Warehouse Man Jr.
- Chris Werkmeister: Retail and Events Manager and Curator of Plushies
- Cameron Lantz: Retail and Events Queen, Future Lorcana World Champion
- Scott Miller: Retail and Events Staff – Philosophy Major/Commander Step-Dad
- Tommy Nguyen: Retail and Events Staff – Hacker/Pokemon TCG Master
Dearest Reader,
Happy Holidays! We’re fast approaching the end of 2023 and it’s time to wrap it up and put a little bow on it. This has truly been an incredible year for Owl Central Games so I’d like to take a moment to reflect, as one tends to do around this time.
At the start of the year, we saw a lot of huge changes and started some massive projects, some of which are only just coming to fruition! We brought Cameron, Scott, Tommy, Jeff, and Abel on board to increase our capacity in the storefront, in our warehouse, and on the tech team. Five new people, bringing us up to 14 staff members total, is a heck of a lot of growth! I’d like to tell the story of that growth by touching on each corner of our business, and lift up the people that helped us get to where we are at the end of this year.
Adam Bowles has been with Owl since the very beginning, and surely most of you reading know who he is. For those of you who don’t – he came to Owl to open our first store location in Reading and was the General Manager up to the start of this year. Now, it’s been Adam’s ambition to do more tech focused programming work for the business, and finally, at the outset of 2023, Adam stepped out of the General Manager role. He passed the baton over to me, and then set all of his focus on the development of a brand-new custom website, which just launched this month! Adam and Dan, our marketing and comms , have been hard at work to finally deliver this new website experience to everyone and I’m terribly impressed by what they’ve managed to do!
To say that Adam has spent the year making a website is an extraordinary understatement of what he’s accomplished. There is an incredible amount that happens behind the scenes so that we can acquire, manage, and process thousands upon thousands of TCG singles. Adam and now Abel, have been programming singles inventory automations and building a new buylist tool that ensures that our inventory is as up to date as possible and stocked with the cards that people want to buy. This is no small feat. Some of the biggest ways that we’ve grown as a business this year all happened behind the scenes and under the hood, and it has gone unsung all year because no one ever gets to really see it.
It has been so exciting to see this work getting done and I have no doubt that our community will soon begin to really feel the quality-of-life improvements that these guys are making possible. And I’m just particularly happy to see Adam’s ambition realized as he now works full time on the maintenance of a beautiful new website for Owl Central Games. Can’t wait to see what he cooks up next!
I’m going to keep you behind the scenes for a while longer to shout out some massively important and little seen individuals who make this business work. Mark is basically like an apparition that few have ever seen or can be sure even exists. But every single MTG card that we buy in the storefront or that comes in through various online buys and collection buys, goes through him. Whenever you place an order for a card, the reason our staff is able to go back into the office and pull that card from our inventory to fill your order, is because of the work that Mark does every day.
You can say the same about Andrew and Kyle when it comes to YuGiOh and Pokémon cards, respectively. But the thing that keeps both these guys busy most of the time is our shipping department. Every day, behind closed doors, we get anywhere from 350-800 orders for singles through TCG Player and Amazon. And every single day, those singles orders need to get pulled from our inventory, picked into stacks of invoices, and then packed into letter envelopes, to be shipped all over the country. This is incredibly demanding work, it is relentless and requires tenacity and focus, and it’s the backbone of our business. Without the work they do, the overall ecosystem that allows us to have such a beautiful store breaks down entirely, so hats off to these gentlemen!
Now, our warehouse is a whole other beast that even some folks who work in the store don’t understand. But Kody and Jeff, keepers of warehouse mysteries, hold it down without fail. The warehouse and the Amazon sales that we do from that warehouse, is what makes it possible for our storefront to have such a deep and full selection of TCG Sealed Products.
Most stores are forced to calculate with certainty how much of a product they can afford to order from a distributor, based on what they can expect to sell to their customers. If those calculations are off at all, it means their customers are either not being served, or they’re stuck holding too much product, hurting them financially. Because of our warehouse and Amazon sales channel there, we can always safely order whatever the store and our customers need, because at worst, we can sell the overstocked products later on Amazon. This is also why, every once in a while, some random old treasure that hasn’t been on store shelves for months or years, might just pop back up in our store. The warehouse has many secrets!
That leads me to Rob. Rob is the store’s inventory manager and is also the warehouse liaison. Diplomatic relations between the store and the warehouse are important, and Rob is just the man for the job. He has refined all of our product ordering processes and is the one person who touches every single sealed product, game, or gaming supply, that we sell in our storefront. He orders it, he checks it in, he ensures our inventory numbers are always correct, he handles the overstocking of new products, and takes things to and from the warehouse as needed to keep the storefront organized and optimal. Let’s not forget though – he’s also the heart of our Minis community and sets the store up for tabletop gaming every single Tuesday. Thank you, Rob!
Dan gets mentioned a little bit in like, every section of this letter, because he does a little bit of everything for everyone. You all know Dan. He’s a real leader and he makes Owl better with every project he works on, so give him a high five the next time you see him!
In summary, big shoutouts to the admin/back of house/warehouse staff for making everything we do at Owl possible. They are unseen and unheard but they’re essential to everything we do and I’m incredibly grateful for their work this year! Now, let’s get back to some more visible stuff.
As for our Game Center in Millersville, PA – well, I’m frankly blown away by the year we have had. Here is a snapshot that I can offer you that I hope scratches the surface of the kind of year it has been. We host TCG events 5 days a week in our play spaces. For all of 2023 we will hit just shy of 8,000 event entries! Now, the absolutely wild part about this is that our event attendance ramped up through the first half of the year and by June, we were routinely exceeding 900 event entries per month!
We have a TON of regulars that come and play in our events every week, and sometimes multiple times a week, but 900 event entries per month is still a gargantuan number, especially considering our store capacity is only 60 seats. I hope those numbers help to illustrate just how large our local and regional community really is. When I started working for Owl in 2021, I could never have imagined this many people choosing to spend their time with us each and every week, and the surge of gratitude I feel when I look back on the year is just overwhelming.
I have to give a massive shoutout to the team that makes that all possible. They check you into your events, buy your singles, sell you products, answer your questions, and steward the experience that you have in our store. Chris, Cameron, Scott, Tommy, and Dan are all absolute heroes for fostering and caring for the community that we have built at Owl. I want to give a special shout out to Chris, our Retail and Events manager, for taking over my previous role, applying himself wholeheartedly into designing the best possible events for our community, and for being incredibly humble and in touch while watching our event numbers go up and up and up.
Chris and Cameron are exceptional leaders. They both constantly apply their experience to finding different ways to make our store and the quality of our community better. There is not a single circumstance that they haven’t seen or dealt with and there is no problem they can’t solve. Both of their commitments to providing the best experience to our community is impressive and the feedback I get about them is overwhelmingly positive. If you have been to our store and had a good experience, it’s almost certainly one of the two of them you have to thank. Not just from the service they provide, but from the example they set for Scott and Tommy, who are routinely striving to live up to the standards that Chris and Cam set.
I am so proud of what they have all accomplished as a team and I am so grateful for each of them. But part of why I’m so overcome with pride is because of who they do all of it for. They work hard for each other, and they work hard for you. So, when I see people gathering in our store, when I see our community growing, when I see folks treating each other with respect, offering warmth, fostering inclusivity, creating a safe space to come together and be themselves, I genuinely feel like we’re doing our part to make the world just that little bit better. Time and time again, you, as a part of our community, make it so worthwhile.
Life is hard. Sometimes it’s scary. Oftentimes it’s lonely. We’re social creatures, no matter how introverted some of us are. The world we live in offers few incentives to get off the couch, put down the doom scroll machine, and get out into the world. But when I see hundreds of people a month, who just like me, need a safe space to go where they can blow off some steam, be free of judgment, and share some happy moments with like-minded people, my heart just explodes. I can’t believe that that’s what we have at 250 Manor Ave. I am dumbfounded that this is what I get to do for a living. And NONE of it would be possible at all if it weren’t for the droves of you who have made our shop a home away from home.
It may be my job to take care of our staff, to take care of our store and the space we share together. But every single time you come and enjoy and appreciate the care we put into it, you make it all completely worth it in every way. Thank you so so so so so so so much for being part of that, it really does mean the world. Happy Holidays and Happy New Year to you all. Can’t wait to see what 2024 brings.
With much love and gratitude,
Berto
P.S.
Thank you to Ken for giving all of us jobs and trusting us all to do our jobs well without micromanaging us <3
