Creature Feature Toys Q&A 1
Welcome to our first Q&A blog! We asked our CFT Insiders to submit their questions about Creature Feature Toys and the team. We had a lot of fun looking through your burning questions about our favorite snacks, our worst shop disasters, and curiosities about our work. This is something we’d love to do again, so keep an eye out for when we collect questions for Round 2!
What are your favorite kinds of pours to do?
Sometimes, the best types of pours are the ones you don’t expect! For this reason, Fuzz has a love-hate relationship with marbles. When marbles turn out good, they turn out good. While there’s absolutely a risk of colors blending and not ribboning in the way we expect, most of the time we still ooh-and-aah at the results!
What’s the team’s favorite snacks?
Fuzz: I usually grab a granola bar to feel healthier, but gummies satisfy my sweet tooth!
Peach: Most flavors of chips, especially spicy chips! Hot Fries and Jalapeno Kettle Chips are a Peach staple.
Ara: I like snacks like jerky or the occasional peanut butter and chocolate candy. But I’d much rather grab an energy drink, tea, or sparkling water!
What is the difference between hand sculpted and 3D printed toys?
Aside from requiring different materials, both traditional and digital methods have their pros and cons and require practice, knowledge, and skill to achieve a polished end result.
For CFT, we sculpt our toys out of non-toxic polymer clay. Having some prior experience with sculpting really helped, although it required some initial testing as some clays were not compatible with silicone or were not preferable for our workflow. Some pros are that the materials for hand sculpting are easier to acquire, having the master in hand helps with visualizing the scale, and there is no need to to store or maintain a costly machine. A big pro to us is also that we take pride in our craftsmanship as we continue to improve and push our capabilities of what’s possible with our skills!
Some cons to hand sculpting is that your first master is the only master you have to begin with. We create durable resin copies and work on perfecting the finish from there, but a lot can go wrong between these stages that may require a lot of fixing or even starting over from scratch. With 3D printing, you have your master saved digitally, so you can reprint or make minor adjustments to the design in the program. Other benefits to working digitally is symmetry, access to more textures, and ability to scale to differing sizes with precise measurements.
All in all, the differences come down to a dongsmith’s skill set and preferences. Neither option is truly better or easier than the other, nor are these the only methods out there to create toys. They all require a heap of knowledge and expertise to make fun and body safe designs!
Other than making dongs, what skills do you need to run CFT?
As it turns out, mastering the fickle materials and tools of dongmaking aren’t the only skills required for our shop. There are quite a few invisible soft skills, along with business minded and technical skills that we’ve found to be useful!
As mentioned before, each member of the team has their own strengths; managerial experience, marketing experience, cataloging skills, information organization, illustration and graphic design, creative writing, game design, etc! Our backgrounds with previous job experiences and degrees have helped us cover different areas of running our business.
One of the most important skills we’ve found has been our ability to research. We’ve had to be critical and creative when finding solutions for this type of business, while always prioritizing safety.
How do you determine what micas are safe to use?
CFT’s safe pigment checklist looks something like this:
Certified in the US to be eye, lip, and skin safe
Ethically and professionally sourced from a trustworthy company
Vegan friendly colors
All shops source based on their own criteria, but we err on the side of caution with pigments, as the toy encounters mucous membranes. For more information, we answer this question in full on our Product Safety FAQs.
Award for the worst shop disaster goes to…?
Not to dong shame, but… To this day, we still aren’t quite sure what happened here. :P
What music do you listen to when you work?
The team listens to a variety of genres across the board, but we usually default to Relaxing Game Soundtracks. The Legend of Zelda, Donkey Kong Country, Yoshi's Island, and Dwarf Fortress are our usual go-to's when we can't think of what to play first.
What are you plans for CFT in the future?
The future is exciting to dream about! We have plans already laid out for the next year or so to continue to grow our catalog with more types of toys, plan more holiday goodies, and continue to develop CFT character lore. It would also be great to sell at more conventions, but we’ll have to see where the future takes us!
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Thank you for sending us your questions! We love hearing from you and sharing a bit about ourselves. Feel free to send in questions and we may feature them in the next blog!