End of the year at imago: fuck-ups and joys

The end of the year is a traditional time for some reflection. The Earth completes its circle (okay, technically it's an ellipse) around the Sun and everything starts over. In a "few" days, we'll have Easter, summer holidays, and another Christmas. At least that's how it feels to me, and the older I get, the more I wonder how I manage to get anything done at all in a year.

A year in a company flies by just as fast. A few meetings, and suddenly we're thinking about when to hold the Christmas party again.

We haven't been lazy this year, though – we built a new gaming room in Ostrava and launched a new website. Those are our wins, but to be honest – we didn't manage everything. Developing the new site was more demanding than originally planned, forcing us to push back some projects. The dice loyalty program and the much-loved Advent contest stayed in the "we didn't make it" drawer.

In 2026, however, we'll open that drawer and take care of both the happy dice hunters and a contest where we can test our knowledge together. Look forward to it!

We're a bit of a weird company. From the very beginning, imago was more of a cluster of friends and acquaintances who almost accidentally united under one goal. And that culture still persists here. It's been working like this for 20 years! We're still learning how to do things professionally, how to improve our services, and most importantly, how to bring customers something more than just a mechanically processed order and a shipped package. Our customers are fans, just like us, and our goods aren't just impersonal consumer items.

Fuck-ups as the engine of progress

But enough with the praise and promises; they say fuck-ups are what drive humanity forward. Of course, only if we learn from them and if the apocalypse doesn't happen. Sometimes things just go wrong. Often it's just a stupid coincidence, a seemingly innocent oversight, or a misunderstanding. Regularly, it involves complications we can't influence at all. Then we might encounter a really unpleasant or even nasty reaction. But that probably comes with the territory. It's all the more rewarding when someone takes the trouble to send us praise or share their personal experience of shopping at imago.

"You're probably my biggest guilty pleasure, from which I've never felt guilty."

Carriers and bending space-time

Things happen regularly that might make you shiver at first, but later become funny stories over a company beer. Carriers are, of course, a grateful source. I firmly believe that simple human error is behind it, but the consequences often defy reason. For example, we expect a larger order of goods from abroad, split into several packages. To this day, we don't understand how it happened that the post office delivered each package to a different address. How is it possible that goods travel halfway across the world just fine but can't manage the last few kilometers to us? The space-time continuum probably collapsed…

Just because the goods arrive doesn't mean we've won. Once, before Christmas, our buyer ordered 300 super-duper tea kettles. They were going to be a sales hit! But after the season, the stock balance settled at a beautiful 298 pieces… Well, sometimes we miss the mark on taste, and the customer is an unpredictable creature.

And worst of all are the customers, or rather, the dwarves!

After all, some customers are fun too. We often say that classic line: "He opened a pub, but people kept coming in." Running an e-shop is fun, if it weren't for the customers who complicate things.

Some customers get angry that we send them newsletters even though they gave us consent. And what's more, we use informal language in them! Despite occasional threats, no one has come to settle it with us in person yet. Fortunately, our Juraj from the shop is the first in line; he's a proud owner of his own armor and chainmail, so he's prepared for any confrontation. His bearded smile reliably disarms even the biggest grump.

But what to recommend to a customer who wants to order a "frame for a poster for a frame for a poster"? After leafing through a textbook on quantum mechanics and higher dimensions for a while, we gave up the search for the ideal product.

Data alchemy and AI

Offering a specific customer specific goods is high-level alchemy. You might think it's enough to build a website and wait for customers to fight over the goods. But behind it all is a terrifyingly complex web of data, analytical services, data feeds, charts, artificial intelligence, and poor marketers drowning in numbers. And sometimes we feel like all of this is just messing with us… The result is a traffic graph personalized for everyone.

Fortunately, it's often an error that a single click can fix. With the transition to the new website, there were admittedly a few more of those clicks. Unfortunately, we could encounter the (un)lucky number 500 on the imago website unpleasantly often. But as soon as the final launch of the new site happened, errors dropped radically. We're still working on it!

When we don't know what to do, we ask the all-powerful AI. Artificial intelligence and large language models changed our field unexpectedly fast. We won't pretend we don't use its services. It saves us so much work that we simply couldn't handle with a reasonable number of people otherwise. Even though I admit that sometimes it's too much, and some fans don't hesitate to throw it in our faces. Sometimes, however, we have to step in and defend the customers themselves from it.

And sometimes we fail to rein in our text translation tool for the Slovak version of the site. Even though it's under the supervision of the aforementioned Slovak colleague Juraj, something slips through occasionally. And Rincewind really doesn't have his fingers in it this time!

We won't just blame the delusions of artificial intelligence here, though. It certainly isn't responsible for the fact that we accidentally operated a test bank terminal for several days. The problem with such a test bank terminal is that it looks, the rascal, like a completely ordinary bank terminal. Except for one small detail - it doesn't send money to the bank! Our accountant is thrilled with us…

Finally, we have various typos and editorial gremlins. We already have a small breeding herd of them here. A useful source of gremlins is our publishing house Mytago. Thanks to it, you can acquire in the future surely rare collector's pieces of titles like Lone Wolf's The Legacy of Vashna with a spine labeled Crusade, or an exclusive version of the eighth volume of the same series, The Jungle of Horrors! It's amazing how many people see the data for such a book during production, and yet no one notices. But we've worked on that too!

To err is simply human. But it's important to learn from mistakes and try to avoid them next time. And not lose your good mood and healthy enthusiasm because of them! Here at imago, we take some things with perspective and humor. Fun is the spice of life, which is regularly shown by internal posts on our bulletin board in the kitchen.

Therefore, dear reader/customer, I want to wish you a healthy dose of humor, perspective, and the resulting good mood for the new year.

author Karel Krajča and Pavla Žižková