Saying Good-Bye To Our Ocean Heights Plaza Location and Hello to Phase 2.5 of Level Up!

We're sad to say that our lease is up at the ocean heights plaza in somer point location.

For reasons beyond our control, our lease is up and we will not be renewing it at our Ocean Heights Plaza in Somers Point location. This means we will be closing the store on March 1 2022. BUT! That is not the end of our second location! We have been planning in the background for a move to a location in Somers Point that will be more permanent than the one we inhabited this last year. 

We moved to Somers Point to dip our toes into the market. Were we too close to our other location? Would Somers Point like us? Could we survive running two locations? And with the help of our amazing customers we have found that Somers Point loves us! It really loves us! And we love Somers Point! So we need to get a more permanent location!

We're sorry to say that markets have been weird and we weren't able to procure a location before the ending of our lease at the shopping center location BUT we're hot on some leads for some great locations in the area! We hope to be opened ASAP but we still need to move out, prep the new store, and move in again, so it's going to be a couple months at least until we get up and running again in Somers Point. 

The good news is that our Mays Landing location is still up and running and doing great! Also our web store, ShopLevelUp.com is a great place to get comics and have them shipped to you if Mays Landing is a little too far away. (or you just don't feel like leaving the house, we get it)

We are so grateful to our amazing customer base that supports us at every turn and gives us the chance to run one of the best stores in town. We literally wouldn't be here without you! We really hope you'll stick with us through this transition and see what awesome stuff we have for you in the future!

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Keep up to date with the move by signing up for our mailing list!

Curbside Pick-up (UPDATED HOURS)

IMPORTANT UPDATE! We now ask that you park your car at the back of the mall at the entrance closest to us. This entrance is near where the Sears back entrance and mechanics entrances were, up the hill from the Forever 21 and H&M entrances. There’s an image at the end of the post showing where this is.

We're open for curbside pick-up! READ THE REST OF THIS POST for how this works and our rules.

How to make an order for curbside pick-up:

• Curbside pickup will be for orders made on ShopLevelUp.com with shipping set to in store pick-up (we will still be shipping out orders if you still want your items shipped!).

• Once the order is placed you will receive a confirmation email that we have your order ready and you can head over. If you don't receive an email in a timely fashion please call the store at (609)-569_9200.

• Once we have confirmed your order is ready head to the mall during our curbside pick-up hours, Tue-Sat 2 pm-7 pm. (We will NOT be at the store outside of these hours so please plan accordingly)

• Park at the mall entrance at the back of the mall nearest our store. This entrance is near where the Sears back entrance and mechanics entrances were, up the hill from the Forever 21 and H&M entrances. Check the bottom of the page for a map of where this is.

• From there call the store at (609)-569-9200 and let us know who you are, what order you made, and the car you are in. We will come down to your car and we ask that you to have your trunk or back seat already open so we can place your order in your vehicle. Please have either your ID or order up on your phone for verification of your order, hold them up to your window so we can see them when we come by. We will place your order in your trunk or back seat and then you are good to go!

We ask that you follow these rules put in place by us and the mall, we have a right to not give you your items if we find you aren't following the rules set in place. These rules are here for the safety of our staff and our customers and we will follow them strictly so please be courteous and follow them as well.

We thank you for the support and your understanding, curbside pick-up is new to us and we hope it’ll be an easy process for both us and our customers!

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MAP

How to Get Your Weekly Comics While We Are Closed

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Hello,

   First of all we’d love to thank all of you for all the support while the store has been closed. It’s inspiring and really shows us what an amazing community we have the pleasure of being in. The reason for this email is because on May 20th, Diamond (our main comic distributor) will begin distributing comics again. As of now we don’t think the store will be open by then so we’re working on a new way to get our comics to you! So keep reading to figure out how to get our new comics!

HOW WE’RE DISTRIBUTING COMICS

   Since we will be likely receiving comics before we can open the store, we’ll be distributing and selling our comics completely via our subscription service. Once you sign up for a comics subscription, which will tell us what comics you want, we’ll send you an invoice weekly as we receive the comics and you can pay from there for your comics and have them mailed to you! We ask that you only put comics and comics series on your list that you intend to purchase as we are going to be extremely conservative with any extra copies. Below is a step by step guide (and video) on how to set up a comics subscription online. We will ask that you give us the titles of the comics they want up to two (2) months in advance so that we can guarantee we will get your comics for you. Moving forward if you are a subscriber every Friday we will be sending out a last chance to order list. If there is anything you would like to add you must reply to that email no later than the following Monday at noon.

HOW TO SUBSCRIBE

1. Go to LevelUpEntertainment.com

2. From the top menu click “Subscribe to Comics” button.

3. This will take you to the form at the bottom of the page for our comic subscription service.

4. Fill out the needed fields and at the bottom in the “Message” section include the comics you want going forward. You can always email us at Contact@levelupentertainment.com with further additions or subtractions to your list after you fill out this form.

5. Once all your information has been filled out hit submit and you’re all done!

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This video takes you through the process of making a comic subscription via our website, LevelUpEntertainment.com! This allows you to pre-order comics and ha...

Model Builder's Competition Follow-Up

Thank all of you who participated in our FIRST EVER Model Builder's Competition! It went so much better than any of us at the store expected, and we're super happy that you all enjoyed yourselves! This competition would all be for nothing if it wasn't for our great Builders in our local community, thanks again!

Now that the competition is over and passed, we wanted to hear from you! For those of you who competed in the competition, you should have gotten an e-mail asking to take part in our survey, and many of you did! We're very excited for the feedback, wanted to give an overview of what those people said, and wanted to address these inputs by telling you what we plan on doing going forward. 

Now these are ONLY responses from people who competed in this years Model Builder's Competition, so it's no everyone's input. If you want your voice to be heard, then let us know in the comments! 

We'll start by going question by question of the survey our contestants filled out, going over what they said, and how we will address their input in the future.

1)Overall how satisfied were you with the competition?

This is a fairly generic question, but it seems overall everyone was pretty pleased with the competition! Yay!

2)Were you satisfied with the model display?

In this category we did have some complaints about model placement, seeing as there were some straight models and some dioramas. For future events we will be looking into better displaying techniques, also we're looking into splitting competitions into different themes/categories. There's more on this at later questions.

3)Did you feel the rules posted on LevelUpEntertainment.com were clear and easy to follow?

It seems like the rules were overall okay, and lead to no confusion.

4) How interested were you in the prizes?

All the competitors seemed pretty okay with the prizes, some of you want to see more prizes in the future, and just from talking with people it might be worthwhile announcing the prizes earlier so people don't buy the models that are prizes before the event. We got our prizes donated to us from our distributor, who is willing to give us more for bigger events, and also we as a store can add to this category if a lot of you continue to compete.

Is there any prizes specifically you'd like to see? More Master Grades? A couple High Grades instead of one Master grade? Tools? 

5) If a future event had a theme (Halloween, Holiday, etc.) would you still be interested in participating?

There was a fairly positive response to this. Our plan was for Halloween Comicfest to have a Halloween or general Spooky themed build event, like make a Dracula Gundam or a Haunted Millennium Falcon. We'd have a different voting for these events. We'd want to do a full popular vote for this, making the voting be completely up to attendees of the event. We'd look to do popular votes for Free Comic Book Day and Halloween Comic Fest, but doing a professional vote for other competitions done in store and not during an event. This way you can prepare your model and display accordingly; more dazzle and less effort into a popular vote but more work and quality in a professionally voted event.

6) How do you feel we could improve?

We really want to here your input on this, contestant or not. We really are looking to improve in every way possible for these events and competition. 

From our surveys from the contestants we got a couple good suggestions. One was more events, which we are very excited and willing to do for your guys. As explained before we want to do more contests with Professional voting and Popular voting, also with different themes. We also heard for competition categories, like single kit, mutli-kit, diorama, etc., we'd be looking into doing these, specifically for the smaller professional vote competitions. We also heard that you all wanted the store to carry more supplies and tools, and we are looking into it! Hopefully more model related supplies will be a thing we carry in the near future.

But now we want to ask you? What do you think about our responses? Do you have any extra input you'd like us to hear? Anyway you'd like to see the competitions and event done differently? Let us know! Comment on this blog or on our posts about them! We love hearing from you; it's the only way we improve!