Per NPR radio news, Hasbro is laying off about 170 employees after "sluggish" holiday sales. This would seem to indicate Hasbro really isn't doing as well as they expected to with their magic army of Bumblebees. Here are a couple links with a bit more info. I haven't found a great article anywhere. http://www.actionfigureinsider.com/main/layoffs-today-at-hasbro Better link: http://news.providencejournal.com/breaking-news/2012/03/hasbro-lays-off-1.html
it's probably their other brands as I'm pretty sure the transformers brand was driving their profits in 2011
Did they say what area the staff work in? Whilst it obviously means restructuring, there is some area they want to change, i wouldn't necessarily put it down to BUMBLEBEE=FAIL.
To be fair, they have a lot more things warming shelves than just millions of Bumblebee's everywhere. GI Joe always gets the bare minimum stock possible at every store I've gone to throughout various cities, and the clusterf*cked reissue/CW/re-re-reissue/etc. Star Wars lines have TONS of stuff that doesn't move. And that's just 3 properties that I moderately pay attention to - who knows how badly other brands are also doing.
I am being unfair to BB (and Tformers- there are lots of Hasbro properties). The second article I found mentions marketing specifically. But the NPR news blurb was very brief. I haven't found anything that fills in the blanks nicely. Sorry.
Hasbro sells other things besides Transformers. TFs, as I recall, did great last year. It's everything else that wasn't so hot.
Hasbro merchandising can be a lot of things. For all we know, this was the Play-Doh Merchandising staff. I don't think there's any doubt that Transformers are doing very well for them. I also don't think this is Transformers "News".
While tfs did sell well in 2011 and I'm sure this statement has more to do with the other hasbro lines I'm betting at least in part the tf line has some involvement. After all it's talking about holiday shopping season sales not over all or yearly sales and most stores were saturated with old tfs on the shelves from over ordering which may have hurt hasbro sales over all with no new product moving or being ordered.
I blame the retailers. My Wal-mart JUST NOW put out DotM wave 4. That shows you how much they pay attention.
I believe at one point, one of the Hasbro exec's at an earning calls stated that DOTM's sales were poor, or something along those lines.
