The seismic change

Today, I’ve got some big news to share with all of you, and there’s really no easy way to say this so I’ll get straight to the point. W?ldcard Custom is going away for the foreseeable future, and we will be sunsetting it at the end of October 2026. In fact, we’ll be stopping all custom, build-to-order, and 1Up Exclusives as well.

That being said, we will still be accepting custom build orders until the end of this month, so you will have one last chance to build that W?ldcard Custom pack of your dreams before we close all orders for good. Of course, any existing custom build orders will also be completed and shipped out as soon as possible, so you don’t have to worry about that.

Believe me, it was not an easy decision, nor was it one we made lightly, because we know that it is one of our absolute core identities. It’s like if Apple cancelled the iPod--borderline unfathomable back in the day. But I think it’s a necessary change.

The fact is that the economy isn’t where it was. Yes, you’ve heard us complain about this before, but things aren’t getting any better. And it has gotten to the point where we can no longer support a complicated, costly program like W?ldcard Custom. It just made it too difficult for us to work effectively and efficiently.

But, there is an upside to this. Because of how inefficient the W?ldcard Custom process was, it had a knock-on effect of making it very difficult for us to update our existing products and create new products for all of you. Just look at how long it has been since we’ve updated some of our more iconic models and you can get an idea of just how trapped we were in this conundrum.

Moving forward, we’re going to shift our focus primarily to ready-made products and new creations. And this has me more excited and inspired than I’ve felt in a long time. I can’t wait to share what I’ve been cooking in the background--but that will come in due time.

What you can expect from us as we transition away from W?ldcard Custom is more updates to our existing products, more new products and more exciting systems that you can use with those products. If there is enough demand, we may do limited drops of unique fabrics or colours for our existing products, but I’m not going to make any promises on that just yet.

We’re also keeping our By Your Command (BYC) program, because it’s important for us to have this two-way communication with all of you when it comes to building products you actually want to use. And also because we always have so much fun messing around with new ideas to create some truly outrageous products.

Will every BYC be a one-off limited product, or will we take the Rainmaker approach and use it to then give one of our products a mid-cycle update? I honestly don’t know, because the answer is probably “it depends”. But either way, I’m excited to help bring your dream bags to life.

Thank you so much for all the support you’ve shown Greenroom136 and W?ldcard Custom over the years. I’m excited to start the next chapter, and I hope you are too.

–Pat