Creating a new business (NEXA Terrain) with the GF

This past weekend, my family and I launched our new business. We are selling “terrain” for miniature war games (like Warhammer, and Infinity). We called the business “NEXA Terrain”. You can find it at www.nexaterrain.com

We went to the Canadian Tabletop Championship and setup a table to sell our stuff. In fact, it was 4 tables:

Everything on the four tables at the front of this picture was made by us on a GF. Here are some close-ups:


Some deck boxes and card boxes for Magic the Gathering cards (and a briefcase to carry them).


This blurry image is some terrain, including a cool Truss Bridge.


More Terrain


Yet more terrain.


Bases for miniatures.

The event had more than a 100 of players. You can see them in the following pictures:

We supplied a lot of the terrain for the tournament tables too.

We’ve been cutting like crazy for the past 2-3 months on the GF. It’s been running about 7-8 hours a day. We made a LOT of stock. It’s been a marathon of effort to get ready! But it was great to be there.

What I really like about the GF is how quickly we can serve customer needs. One guy looked at my Truss Bridge and said “I would totally buy that if there were small ramps on each side”. During a down time, I designed some ramps, my wife printed them out and brought them over. The next time the guy passed by, I said: “look, we made some ramps for it”. He was blown away and bought a kit.

The next morning, two people asked my wife if we had trays to carry “armies”. She said no, but gave me a call (I took the morning off). I designed a tray, cut it and brought it over by lunch time. We sold it immediately.

And now I have a new design to sell.

We sold a decent about of stuff. But we also had 3 store owners approach us to ask if they could sell out terrain in their store. We also made contact with some tournament organizers in the States that are interested in bulk orders for their tournaments.

It was a great lauch to our new little family business. I hope that in a few years it will grow nicely.

Thanks to GlowForge for making this kind of business possible for us. Your “hobby” machine worked fantastically during our production. It’s a real “work horse”.

72 Likes

Great story. Thanks for sharing.

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I am so happy for you and your wife getting this great launch of your business. You know your customers and the capabilities of your Glowforge. Great combo. I wish you great success.

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Fantastic and Congratulations! Good for you and the family!

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Congrats on the new business. Sounds like there’s a definite need!

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Outstanding! I certainly would have enjoyed RPGing more had I been able to do what we can do with a GF. I never really enjoyed the RP part! LOL

Great work and so cool that you were able to provide immediate solutions to customers. Good luck to you!

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How cool Ben! SCORE!

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This is amazing! So happy for you and your family. Having the ability to design and create custom pieces quickly should give you a real advantage. Best of luck going forward!

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How fun to start up your own business! So cool that we can design on the fly for projects. Hope you enjoy!

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Great idea and everything looks sharp!

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We would have totally bought some stuff when we still played Warhammer! But we still have friends who do! I’ll send them the link to your site!

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I am so envious of your ability to remember everyone’s actual names!

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I totally agree, Donna!

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Thanks, Mike!

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They’re not used that much, so when I see one I tend to remember it. Now, if only I could remember what I had for dinner last night.

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Congrats i’ll share the website on my feeds hope you guys will be very successful! :grinning::pray:

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Congratulations. Great way to make contacts and future business prospects by displaying you work at that event.

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Congratulations, hope to be able to start small business with mine, help with retirement and boredom

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