Behind The Scenes: Fumo Production

Hi everyone!

Leaflit here again with more "Behind The Scenes" with our Fumo Production.

How does a Fumo go from start to finish? We'll take a look into that here, but first a little bit of about fumos in general.

What Are Fumos?

The Fumo style of plushies began in the Touhou Fandom with its origins at Comiket. They're known for a simplified facial structure, a lackin gof a nose, large wide-set eyes and a neutral "bored" expression. The original Fumos were of Touhou's Reimu and Marisa and new expressions were added throughout fan "doujin" merchandise of different Touhou characters.

In addition, Fumos are known for their sitting style and clothing that actually is worn by the dolls.

The style became beloved by many in the Touhou community, and the style started to become known throughout the anime and gaming community. In fact, to the point that people began investing in Fumos! Fumo runs have been known to be difficult to acquire such as the "Deka Fumos" which even appreciated 300% in value!

They're a fun style of plushie that has vibes of the early days of anime and games with their doujin style.

As a fan of Fumos ourselves, we wanted to produce similar styles plushies of our characters to add to our own FUMO collections. (I own the original Marisa and Reimu puppet fumos myself).

The Start

At the very beginning it begins with character. We decide on which character we are going to develop Fumos of depending on popularity. Our streamer talents are an obvious choice, but when it comes to our other projects a little bit more thought has to go into it.

Once we have decided on a design and have gotten proper feedback from fans and studio members we go onto the next phase, which is the designing phase.

Once we have a total breakdown we have to consider unique design issues with each doll.

We have to maintain the following factors:

1. Clothing is an actual physical object and not just embroidered onto the character or printed onto the character.
2. The doll can sit up on its own.
3. The doll adheres to the original design and personality of the characters.
4. The doll maintains a design consistency for all other dolls in its generation (We are using generation 2 dolls right now)

With the Rana Fumo, we had some concerns with her being able to stand up on her own, so our solution was to add heavy plastic beads at the base that would help with balance, as well as create a base for her to stand on her own.

After the designing phase we have the prototyping phase where we receive our first sample of the Fumo.

In this case we were extremely happy with it but there were some design concerns with the consistency and cuteness of the character.

When placed side to side, the fabric itself didnt line up with the original skin tone of the character, so we had to go back and revise it.

It's a bit hard since sometimes lighting can change this.

In this case, we still decided to change the color. We have a lot of options to choose from.

Then we move on to second prototyping.

Where we have the changes we have made, and we combine that with information from the designer of the original character and the talent themselves.

In this case we wanted to change the expression to be more in line with what the original talent wanted.

Rana wanted a more "unamused expression". This was mentioned at an earlier phase but was lost in translation.

Once this phase finishes up and we have the final approved design. We then move into the pre-order and production phase, which could take anywhere from 2-4 months.

Here we can gauge how much interest there is in purchasing so we can try to hit certain milestones (usually at ~80 units and then at ~300 units to try to lower the price of production for us). In addition we want to have enough that it'll be available for new community members, as well as some for conventions.

We don't want to create FUMO FOMO, but as you can see its quite a process and the cost depends on the amount of units we order... so its not really possible to continually manufacture older designs. So we have no choice really but to retire them.

I hope this was an insightful and fun post into some more of our behind the scenes stuff!

If you enjoyed this please drop a comment to let us know that you enjoy these kinds of posts so we can continue to make them. (I want to try to spend the most amount of time making the kind of content you guys want for Patreon).