For Chessex's first Holiday Dice Calendar, we decided to do an unboxing series on our TikTok channel. It would soon become a beloved classic in the tabletop gaming community. 

The team at Chessex had put so much love into this product, and we had to do everything we could to get the word out. For most of November, I had been working on paid ads and a digital marketing campaign with ICv2 to announce this brand-new product. I shipped one of our dice calendars to Jacob Pauwels, famous for his Roll for Sandwich series on TikTok. He did his own Adventures in Aardia unboxing series each day. It was a fantastic influencer collaboration. Jacob was an absolute joy to converse with via email!

The idea to create our own series of videos was proposed the week of Thanksgiving. This gave me less than a week to create a gameplan and draft a script before December arrived. I proposed we make eight videos to allow for time to shoot the footage, record the voiceovers, and use Adobe Premiere Pro to create the final content. Every three days, a new video had to be published. With support from my team, we made it happen. 

There were a lot of firsts for me while producing these videos and I had to learn on the fly because the deadline was tight.  In the earlier videos, my voice fluctuated a lot (I was fighting a bad cold). I had used Premiere Pro before, but this project put my skills to the test. By the last video, the grand unboxing finale I have featured here, I could see how much I had improved. It was hard work at the time, and it was also so much fun. 

The best part? In 22 days, our TikTok channel gained 100+ followers. It was unbelievable to see how much our new channel grew when we increased our posting cadence on that platform. Since then, short-form reels have only increased in popularity, and I don't see that trend going away any time soon.