Quote Originally Posted by nikkubus View Post
I disagree with this bit unless you are breeding visual to het or better. It can be a huge money sync to breed recessives if you aren't smart about it. Plenty of money to be had breeding the right incomplete dominants. To know what those are you really need to study the market over a long period of time to understand the cycles things tend to take.


Don't rush into things. Take your sweet time learning everything you can and you will avoid some major mistakes. Plan projects out well to where you are always making an improvement each generation, and the animals you purchase and holdback are not just used one season and then dead weight.

I would not focus on expensive females, just get some 1-2 morph low-to-mid range girls that work well for your project. I would spend big money on your males, not just try to breed what you already have.

Avoid wholesaling if you can. You make next to nothing in comparison to selling outright, and even the best wholesalers do not do the best job with quarantine. If you can't sell directly, I would start with your local pet shop, you are more likely to get better deals and not have to pay shipping. I have worked with BSR in the past, but not recently. With MM, it seems a lot less necessary than in the past.

100% agree that you need to pick projects you are passionate about. There might be over 9000 Pastels on the market right now, but how many of them are combined with morphs that really showcase what they can do? How many have been carefully bred by selecting the highest quality color adults to breed from? If you can make people say "WOW!" when they look at your hatchlings, it doesn't matter how saturated the market is. Do what you love and it will show in your "product". Go pick any JKR or JDC animal for sale, then compare the price and look to another that is the exact same combo from somebody else and you will see what I mean.

I was making project wishlists for years before I started breeding or buying animals to breed. Pages and pages of cool looking BPs on a pinterest trying to narrow down what I wanted to work on first. Notebooks and notebooks full of working out punnets with different pairings, generation by generation, trying to figure out the best way to go about hitting goals, least amount of normals produced, getting good profit ratios, and so on. If you do this, you might have a chance to turn a profit fairly quickly. If you don't, you almost certainly will be in the hole for a very long time. I'm more than happy to share what I've learned, but it's easier to make suggestions if I have more info about what you are interested in. Far easier to critique bad or so-so ideas and suggest ways to make the same thing work better.

Black Widow x Enchi is not something I would breed unless the Black Widow is an exceptional quality example of the morph and male. I don't know which is male and female and what you are hoping to accomplish there, but every single morph in that makeup is cheap and oversaturated in the market. If the Black Widow is the female, just get a better male to breed her with. Clown would bring that project to the next level. Leopard would too. I'd do something like Black Pastel Leopard Clown male x Bee het Clown female instead. Or Enchi Leopard Clown male x Black Pastel het Clown female.
Thanks so much for your insight! I have definitely been taking my time with this, I have been following the industry for at least a decade and am finally honing in on which species I'd like to breed (including BPs). But I honestly haven't thought that far ahead in terms of BP projects and you're right it's the smarter thing to do. The BP morphs that I currently have, I thought were cool when I bought them. With the exception of my M Pastel Clown, I think he's cool too but I got a good deal on him when I bought him.

Unfortunately, I've already made some mistakes by your definition. My Black Widow is a female, I've already bred her to my male Enchi. The one morph they produced that I really took a liking to was a Black Pewter and I'll be holding him back. My other pairing will be M Pastel Clown x F Lesser Bee.

I replied to SPs post expressing my interest in Pieds and Clowns, but the one I forgot about is the Blue-eyed Lucy. I definitely want to produce my own someday. I started this by breeding my M Normal x F Lesser Bee, and got a few Lessers out of it. In hindsight, probably not the best idea but I figured now I could get a Mojave, raise it up alongside them and then breed them. Outside of this, I do want to get into a different, separate project. The challenge is figuring out where else to start when I only know the basic morphs well.