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I wish to add to my previous post that there might be a significant market for manufacturers of assorted fairy chess pieces sold individually, and/or packed as a customized set according to a customer's order. It might be helpful in this regard, at least, to know roughly how many people play all sorts of chess variants worldwide.
Assuming the CV community isn't as horribly niche as I think it is, a manufacturer of just fairy chess pieces sounds like prime Kickstarter fuel.
Here's a recent Kickstarter for Chess variant pieces:
That one suffered from both ineffective execution (making pieces intended for only one variant, and not the idea you were thinking of) and ineffective marketing (allcaps tends to make you sound like a crazy person). I'm sure it might have succeeded if the creator improved their writing (or maybe just hired a marketing guy) and thought of more than just promoting their own variant.
There's an old thread devoted the idea of Universal Pieces (started by CVP editor Joe Joyce, circa 2007), if one clicks on "List all subjects" on the Comments page. It comes very close to the notion I was thinking of, namely assorted fairy chess pieces being manufactured & sold individually &/or in a customized set for a customer order. I might have said these could be 3D western style pieces (not really for, say, Shogi) that wouldn't clash if used with a standard chess set made of the same material. In fact such a manufacturer could stick to just plastic fairy pieces, all compatible with each other.
The hard part could be assessing which pieces (of the endless ones) would be worth producing in the greatest numbers in the shop ahead of orders coming in. Some would be easy choices, such as Archbishops (which could alternatively have a different figurines if the customer prefers to call them, say, 'Princesses'). Some could be made as unique special orders from scratch if a customer is willing to wait & perhaps pay a little more. It does seem like a very dicey proposition for anyone thinking of trying it, but it could be a safer bet if combined as a sideline with the (possibly existing) production of standard chess pieces of compatible style, for example. It's too bad there seems no way to estimate how many CV players there are worldwide (not counting Chess, Chinese Chess or Shogi, at least). That could help anyone thinking of such a venture. Perhaps a unique visitor hit counter for this website might be installed at some point, to get a crude estimate of the amount of interest in CVs out there. [edit: The total registered users of this website at present is 3401, if that's useful to anyone; the number of members of the Chess Federation of Canada presently is only about 2000. The CVP pops up early when one Googles "Chess Variants", so a unique visitor hit counter might indeed over time have a good chance of roughly indicating global interest in CVs.]
I added an edit to my last post, for anyone who missed it.
For anyone's information:
There's at least one manufacturer of any customer's design of chess pieces (or boards, probably) that I found with a Google search (albeit in China) [edit: except it appears 'customer' must be a company]:
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Mr. Streetman wrote circa 2010: "Does anyone know a sources of chessman that can be used for the many chess variants"?
I thought I'd mention a solution that's very cheap, albeit not at all pretty, and though it's obvious it might be overlooked. Namely, wrap elastics around spare chess set(s') pieces to obtain up to 6 additional piece types (plus two more if rook(s) are used upside down). The pieces with elastics could represent any type of fairy pieces, though ones representing compound pieces may be easiest to readily identify while playing. Even coins might be used (I think there may be 6 US coin denominations; I know there's 6 Canadian ones, if one includes the now disused Cdn penny).
I was inclined to post this as a comment under 'Crafts' if appropriate there, but there seemed to be no comments allowed for such.