In 2015, I started to develop a skin tone that was to be known as "Cocoa," but it ended up being more of a "purple."
The
sunk cost fallacy (an unrecoverable cost) meant that I ended up keeping the purple skin tone around even though it didn't represent anybody apart from
Thanos.
The sunk cost fallacy comes about from the costs involved in developing a color match for the frame (injection-molded Polyoxymethylene) and the shell (slush cast Soft Vinyl).
Light diffuses when it reflects from a matte surface which causes the material color to appear lighter. The differing material properties of both Polyoxymethylene and Soft Vinyl make color matching a time-consuming and costly process as we need to do actual casts to see how light will reflect from the surface of the component.
If you take one of our vinyl components like the bust or head cap, you will notice that the color is darker on the inside than the outside due to the diffused reflection of light from the matte surface. To attain the best match, we need to guesstimate how much darker the base color should be.
Sandblasting is the process that gives the inside of a mold a matte finish. The injection molds have a different sandblast grade than the vinyl molds as both materials will diffuse light differently. Working out the grade is also part of skin tone color management. If we sandblast a new mold too much, the molded part will appear lighter in tone.
Trial and error is the name of the game to get a good but not perfect match.
By 2016, I started to learn that the sunk cost fallacy was costing me more than the initial Cocoa development costs - it was costing my soul in terms of lying to myself trying to pass off the purple tone to represent darker-skinned humans.
In early 2017, I started revamping the Cocoa tone which went through several internal iterations before being finalized late that year.
While I was happy with the new Cocoa, I soon discovered that it was to be the most resource-intensive skin tone to work on. The properties of soft vinyl encompass blemishes through the slush casting process that are much more noticeable on the Cocoa skin tone leading to higher failure rates. We also spend up to 3 times longer to manually buff down the vinyl surface before assembling the bodies.
From its release in 2017 until mid 2020, Cocoa continued to sell the least out of all the skin tones.
Nonetheless, I strongly felt that Smart Doll could not be complete without Cocoa - because without it, we would only have Cinnamon and Tea, but as we all know, all good things come in three - just like the Star Wars trilogy. Wait - you telling me there were nine episodes?!
While we will never have nine skin tones given our small team of 20+, I am happy that the current lineup broadly represents and celebrates human diversity - and sometimes blue (green soon) aliens too ;-)
Better Together. Stronger Together. Unity represents the united colors of Smart Doll.
On a side note - I mentioned that Cocoa sold the least up until mid 2020 - but then the semi-real sculpts came along and now Cocoa sales are about the same as Tea but nearly reach Cinnamon levels when we release a semi-real girl like Unity ;-)
In 2015, I started to develop a skin tone that was to be known as "Cocoa," but it ended up being more of a "purple."
The
sunk cost fallacy (an unrecoverable cost) meant that I ended up keeping the purple skin tone around even though it didn't represent anybody apart from
Thanos.
The sunk cost fallacy comes about from the costs involved in developing a color match for the frame (injection-molded Polyoxymethylene) and the shell (slush cast Soft Vinyl).
Light diffuses when it reflects from a matte surface which causes the material color to appear lighter. The differing material properties of both Polyoxymethylene and Soft Vinyl make color matching a time-consuming and costly process as we need to do actual casts to see how light will reflect from the surface of the component.
If you take one of our vinyl components like the bust or head cap, you will notice that the color is darker on the inside than the outside due to the diffused reflection of light from the matte surface. To attain the best match, we need to guesstimate how much darker the base color should be.
Sandblasting is the process that gives the inside of a mold a matte finish. The injection molds have a different sandblast grade than the vinyl molds as both materials will diffuse light differently. Working out the grade is also part of skin tone color management. If we sandblast a new mold too much, the molded part will appear lighter in tone.
Trial and error is the name of the game to get a good but not perfect match.
By 2016, I started to learn that the sunk cost fallacy was costing me more than the initial Cocoa development costs - it was costing my soul in terms of lying to myself trying to pass off the purple tone to represent darker-skinned humans.
In early 2017, I started revamping the Cocoa tone which went through several internal iterations before being finalized late that year.
While I was happy with the new Cocoa, I soon discovered that it was to be the most resource-intensive skin tone to work on. The properties of soft vinyl encompass blemishes through the slush casting process that are much more noticeable on the Cocoa skin tone leading to higher failure rates. We also spend up to 3 times longer to manually buff down the vinyl surface before assembling the bodies.
From its release in 2017 until mid 2020, Cocoa continued to sell the least out of all the skin tones.
Nonetheless, I strongly felt that Smart Doll could not be complete without Cocoa - because without it, we would only have Cinnamon and Tea, but as we all know, all good things come in three - just like the Star Wars trilogy. Wait - you telling me there were nine episodes?!
While we will never have nine skin tones given our small team of 20+, I am happy that the current lineup broadly represents and celebrates human diversity - and sometimes blue (green soon) aliens too ;-)
Better Together. Stronger Together. Unity represents the united colors of Smart Doll.
On a side note - I mentioned that Cocoa sold the least up until mid 2020 - but then the semi-real sculpts came along and now Cocoa sales are about the same as Tea but nearly reach Cinnamon levels when we release a semi-real girl like Unity ;-)
While the head and hands will be vinyl - you have a choice of two different types of body - one is referred to as Cortex and the other as Vinyl. Both body types are pre-built.
