Closeup tour of Worldbuilders Central Part Two: The Tinker’s Packs

Some of you may know that the Worldbuilders office is actually half Tinker’s Packs–we all work out of the same building. In fact, we found out recently that a lot of places that have an online store actually have a separate warehouse where all their stuff is stored and fulfilled. Leave it to us to do things strangely.

But here’s a quick tour of the store! Behind every online storefront, there’s a physical space where stuff is organized and real people work to get you your real orders. When you enter the Worldbuilders building, you’re greeted with this view:

Welcome to the Tinker’s Packs!

That’s the packing table up there, with packing material stored underneath and Adam and Nicole’s desks off in the distance. How it works is, Nicole and Adam process orders, print packing slips and postage, then get everything on the table to pack. They go one order at a time, picking products as needed, and triple-checking their work. They’re really good at making sure you get exactly what you ordered. Then it’s packed and staged right by the door for an end-of-shift post office run. It’s pretty much linear, starting at their desks and ending by the door.

Here’s Adam’s desk. He was way too happy when the Owlbears came in.

And this is Nicole’s. Notice Princess Unikitty on her monitor and the dewey-eyed drawing of Brett’s cat, David Bowie. Nicole likes cats.

Here’s how the cards and posters are stored–the cards in boxes, and the posters in old map stands. The jewelry is stored in card catalogues (seriously).

You may have seen the foreign language wall in some of our videos. We like this wall because it’s colorful, and looks pretty darn awesome. We have a bunch of authors’ books in TONS of different languages, and one thing we love doing is ooh-ing and aah-ing over the wide variety of different takes on cover art for the same book.

And it looks cool year round–the lottery shelves tend to stay empty during the fundraiser off-season.

Speaking of books, Pat has to sign all of these tomorrow night. This is actually fewer than usual.

When we get tee shirts in, they’re all lumped into a shipping box. We pull everything out, inspect them for flaws (our printer is actually really good, so we don’t find many), fold them and bundle them for storage on a bunch of wired shelves. They’re all marked by size and style, and tied in bundles of 10 for easy inventory counts.

When you need one, this is where we get ’em.

And if you want to grab one from the top, there is so much top to grab from!

All our store stuff is done in-house. Nicole tackles all the CSS on our website, Brett does the store graphics and photos (with Rachel taking over when he’s distracted), Rachel sends out the monthly newsletter, Adam tracks inventory, and all of us pitch in to develop new products–the benchmark being, what would we totally buy if it was available? Because even though it’s our store, we’re all still geeks for this sort of thing.

Store photos? This is where the magic happens. Right next to the UPS ship station, above the office supplies.

At least we have tee-shirt mannequins now–thanks Craigslist!

Now that we’ve completely ruined the magic for you, we’re going to get back to some order fulfillment.