How to supplement proven prizes with new, hot, & trending items

The Core & Supplemental balance

Redemption Plus
R+ Blog
4 min readSep 19, 2018

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You know you need core items that are proven to be high-performing in your redemption program. These core prizes lay the foundation of your assortment and are the items you should always have in stock at your counter. They’ve shown success over an extended amount of time throughout numerous redemption areas around the country.

But how do you incorporate fresh items regularly to keep guests coming back for more? The trick is finding prizes that compliment core items. We classify these products as “supplemental”. Core and supplemental items work together like dips in the chip aisle at the grocery store.

Core vs. Supplemental (& Flash)

Our core and supplemental items working together are what makes up your prize assortment. Each category plays a specific role in incentivizing your guests. The core is proven to be popular among players and supplemental items you use to change things up a bit will delight your regular repeat customers by adding new selections into your assortment.

Supplemental prizes are a combination of new items and flash items brought into our line to challenge the core from getting stale. These items should make up about 20 percent of your SKUs and should match your chosen core item themes.

Flash” items are seasonal prizes, movie-oriented licensed items, and other quick-moving trendy things. It’s doubtful these items move into our core assortment, but they are still valuable to your customers. Flash items allow you to capitalize on current consumer trends, giving your guests the chance to redeem prizes they would buy elsewhere — like a fidget spinner.

How does this look in action?

This 16-square-foot Action Gear Storyboard is mostly made up of items in our core assortment — like Samurai Swords. To round out the square footage of the Storyboard, we included three newly-added NERF items to supplement the core prizes already in Action Gear.

The NERF prizes allow you to rotate new product into your display without a big investment. As the higher ticket priced items in this theme, these NERF prizes will motivate your guests to spend more money in the game room in order to achieve that ticket value range. For guests who aren’t able to earn enough, the remaining similar prizes in the Action Gear theme will make good redemption options for them.

Refining our line

Our Product Solutions team has been working on refining our line to be able to buy deeper in what we know you need, while still providing you with trending and new items.

As a result of the core and supplemental strategy, you will start to see items cycle out of our line and new items cycle in. Don’t worry, we’ll be keeping the highest performing core items and bring in new items to challenge the core assortment. This allows us to ensure our line will perform optimally in your program. We’re also always just a phone call away if you need help replacing any items that are exiting our line!

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Our proprietary Storyboards are a series of pre-designed merchandising layouts, backed by analytics. They’re created with a specific theme or category in mind to engage your guests and make finding the perfect prize a piece of cake.

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Redemption Plus
R+ Blog
Editor for

Serving the family entertainment industry with services that simplify and prizes that perform.