The Flip Fit Journey: How we created our own card game

It’s a deck of cards, right? What’s the big deal? Ok, it has some unique exercises and a good premise behind it. But still, it’s a deck of cards – super common – how hard could that be to make? Well…I’d like to share with you all the desire, mistakes, work, time, negotiation, planning and logistics that went into developing a brilliant idea Leah had while driving home from work on a December day in Phil Campbell, AL. The amount of detail and unforeseen problem solving that went into creating Flip Fit will probably surprise most of you – it sure as heck did me while doing it! And, hey, if you’re here because you have an awesome idea you’d like to make reality, hopefully you’ll learn a few tips from my mistakes! Certainly reach out and give me all your questions, I’d love to share what I’ve learned if you don’t find it here. I plan to be as transparent as possible, so lets dive in!

OK, where to start. Well, I suppose I should provide a little background and an explanation of the “recipe” for Flip Fit. Step one- back in 2019 when we started this website I began dabbling in graphic design art with a free software download called Inkscape (really worth a look if you’re interested, except it has one flaw when it comes to printing…which I’ll get to later). I learned rather quickly and came up with several designs including our NRJ logo we still use on t-shirts, stickers, phone covers, etc (still up for sale on Our Shop, btw). Step two- from November 28-January 23 we were in a very clean and beautiful, yet super isolated without a vehicle, RV park… And I was in charge of keeping the kids busy while Leah was at work which took lots of imagination, playing and wrestling around outside. Take the first two ingredients and add Leah’s creative mind, and poof – the idea of Flip Fit is born.

A few other ingredients that made it work include a background in exercise science, physical therapy, personal training, time to study parental interaction that really makes kids light up, and an itch to create. Why don’t we take our knowledge, desire to improve parent-kid bonding, and make a game that helps to solve the issue many parents face: I want to be healthy and exercise, but my kids won’t let me, and I really hate to stick them on the screen for entertainment? Here’s the video explaining “What is Flip Fit” if you’ve not already watched it.

Alright…now the nitty gritty was set to begin! I had something to work on – put my mind to! As the video above describes, I literally scratched down doable exercises in four categories and threw some stars on the Superhero and Funny cards the night before I took the kids outside announcing – “Hey, lets play a new game Mom and I came up with”. And they loved it…and I broke a legit sweat from a work out for the first time in months! So, I added a few more cards, and the kids still loved it. THEY ASKED TO PLAY IT AGAIN!

This time I was smart and set my phone up on a tripod to take pictures of us doing the exercises, and on to Inkscape I went to start creating! From that moment on, my routine changed. I would be up with the kids between 6:30-7am, preparing them for the day and school, teach them their curriculum for the day, lunch and as many engaging activities as I could come up with, play, chore time, make dinner, clean up from dinner, night routine with the kids, put them down, chat with Leah a bit, and put her to bed around 9:30, which is when I would work in quiet until around midnight. Then do it again. But it wasn’t a drag – I was energized by this because I was creating something I was passionate about!

Mixing play with exercise? Yep – these are the original pictures taken as described. The very first card I created was “Strong Guy Smash” – see it?

This routine continued most nights of the week over six of the last seven months (I took time away from the project during most of our Florida trip). Including template creation, modifications, edits, and image creation, I would estimate I spent on average 4-5 hours per card. There are 54 cards in our Flip Fit deck – and the box I had to design. Continuing to add to, refine and edit, I finally had close to a printable product around March 23 (when we landed in Lake City, SC for Leah’s second placement). It was time to find a manufacturer and open up several cans of worms I never knew I would face.

That’s a cool progression, right?

Alright, time to choose a manufacturer… lets make this happen! Oh, wait, I’ll need a business bank account from which to make any deposits necessary – Ok, lets do that first. Scrrr – I need an official business entity to do that. Well, we’ll start there. Because of our situation with frequent travel, I chose to set Narrow Road Journeys up as a sole proprietorship out of Noblesville, IN. I did a lot of research between this and an LLC, so if you are on the fence, I’d be happy to let you know more details of what led me to this decision. Now, in order to be official, I needed a DBA (doing business as name) registered with Hamilton County – which needs an in-person notary signature… and I was in South Carolina NOT Indiana. But after a little digging I discovered that, like many other areas of business, COVID had prompted changes here as well. Did you know for a small fee you can do an online meeting with a notary? Well, you can, and I did!

With this I was able to set up a small-business account, and decided to go with Novo (although they do not have cash back rewards, they offer many other small-business-friendly perks – I’m very pleased at this point). NRJ was now in the process of being a registered official business! With my designs, ideas and work about to be in print I figured I should look into protecting them somehow. This led me to register for a copyright and trademark – both long processes at the federal level. The registration is in and once approved, back-dates to date of application acceptance. OK, check. Now it was time to choose a manufacturer.

But, hold the phone. If I have something to sell, I have to be prepared to sell it on any platform, which nowadays always ends up with Amazon being a likely probability. Ok, what does my product need to sell there? Well, each item needs a UPC. How do I get that? Back to research. Amazon requires a UPC called a GTIN to sell, well lets get one of those! Of course the money-making machine will put this on your products, but does so at a fee for every single item sold… or, I could apply it to my product at the time of printing and skip on this cost. So with a purchase of the GTIN, I was provided a PNG image I could use to put on my box along with an account to manage products and activate when needed. That’s cool.

Am I set to begin working with a manufacture? Yeah, finally, now it was time. *For the purpose of writing, it was easier to explain the above steps sequentially. In actuality, I had begun the process about to be described in and amongst the above. Let me just say, I am a very proud American citizen and wanted very badly for the Flip Fit box to say “Made in the USA”. However, I also found myself quickly thrust into the business world, making decisions for my business, possibly my future income. Now it came down to numbers. I feel I did a good job getting quotes from both the major players in the US as well as oversees through Alibaba.com. Unfortunately, for the exact same quality of product, I would be able to get the Flip Fit cards printed and shipped to me for nearly a 1/4 of the cost oversees versus in the US. Again, I am viewing this as way more than a hobby, so the choice was obvious.

Backing up the process just slightly, I should tell you this: In order to compare apples to apples, I thoroughly educated myself in playing card options – I had no idea the variety that exists. The cards themselves are rated by gsm – or card thickness – as well as with a “core” (blue black or grey) to prevent ability to see through. So for example, you can get 280gsm blue core, or 350gsm coreless, or 300 black core or… And then there is the finishing – matte vs laminated vs air cushioned – oh and the type of printing or accents. Whew! Luckily, I was able to find a manufacture (who I did not end up using, but appreciate their willingness to educate) that sent me a sample of what they offer in order for us to have a tangible product to feel and decide with. For our purposes, we went with a 300gsm coreless, laminated finish.

Choices, man! I know we made the right one!

I had now decided the medium I was going to print on, and where I was going to source from. Alibaba.com has done a great job doing their best to take the fear and uncertainty out of ordering oversees. There are layers of protection for buyers that made me more comfortable with this decision. My initial inquiries on production went to eight companies in China. China is 12 hours ahead of EST – well that fit into the routine I described above. They start their work day at 8am so I would jump on in the evenings and work with them until their noon (my midnight) lunchbreak. Man it was a hoot! Through a translated messaging platform and emails, I was able to evaluate and negotiate with each manufacturer until I made my choice and accepted an offer in around 10 days. Another peice of mind for us is the manufacturer I chose is FairTrade certified with an excellent reputation in the industry.

This is an actual shot Leah grabbed as I was trying to do some design work in the morning before everyone got up. When asked what he wants to be when he grows up, Fisher has most recently replied “I want to make workout cards” – being a role model is so humbling!

Each manufacturer has their own template to work with their printing system, so now that I had a manufacturer chosen, I had a printing template on which to transpose my images onto – one by one! Oh and around 2 weeks prior to this I found out that printing companies will only accept images printed in CMKY color coding, not RGB coding. (Remember the one flaw I mentioned above?) The software I had been using, Inkscape, does not have CMKY!! The easiest process to make this change was to sign up for Adobe Illustrator and use that. Now, I had to change 54 cards and a box (one by one!) over to a brand-new-to-me graphic design software in order to make sure the color coding would allow true-to-color printing, and do the editing from there! Working with our chosen manufacturer and their graphics specialist, I spent some late nights going back and forth with them making sure the process was smooth in order to complete the sample order on time.

Wait, what time-line? Again, we travel frequently, and were planning to spend 6-8 weeks in Indiana in June and July. I needed to make sure our first intenvtory order of 1,000 cards from China was delivered to Noblesville, IN somewhere during that time – all of this timing out with a Kickstarter campaign to generate a buzz about our new product (I’ll cover the Kickstarter process in the next blog entry). This meant I needed to submit my final designs for gross printing by a certain time, which meant I had to have the samples delivered at a certain time, which meant I had to have the designs close to a final product quality by a certain time. Continually working backwards, a process of several months with buffer time built in, quickly came down to literally hours within our time-line. That was yet again, another crash course for me – logistics!

An actual timeline sketch from my journal made just after choosing a manufacturer.

So working to establish the business within a process utilizing companies on EST, manufacturer negotiations and finalizations on China time, and loving my kids while doing home duties with Leah working was a blur of activity to say the least. The timeline I set out was helpful as each step was pretty much in-line with very little alteration to the schedule. We received the sample pack right on time, and were able to submit the final designs for gross printing, along with complete payment, after a flurry of editing with Leah’s help right on schedule!

Pictures of the sample pack and the gross product after printing and being packaged by our manufacturer! There is 1,000+ of those cards sitting in a Los Angeles dock, just waiting to be passed on to UPS…Patience, a lesson, remember?

So, yeah right – It’s just a deck of cards! It was an awesome lesson for me is what it was. Multiple lessons in fact. Lessons in creating, graphic design, business, logistics, faith, trust, negotiation, and patience that I will have for the rest of my life! That was just the creation process. In the next blog I plan on laying down what it took to pull off a successful Kickstarter campaign and initial marketing push!

Thanks for reading. Really, should you have any questions regarding what was covered, please contact me. I would love to give you more detail to help you in your journey!