Comic book website Bleeding Cool has announced some potentially very good news for collectors – they’re reporting that this week, for the first time, Hasbro is making individual figures available to the direct market and Diamond. This could mean many things: if this goes to plan, it would be easier to acquire figures at your local comic book shop, because instead of having to always order a case, they could simply as many as they want of an individual character – which could perhaps also bode well for the media side as well, as healthy toy sales in many cases translates to the accompanying fiction as well. It may also mean the end of having to pay more for certain figures online. And last but not least, it should make army builders’ lives a little bit easier.
This may be a smart business decision for Hasbro, making the more popular toys easier to acquire like this. It could also coincide with their increased emphasis on collectors that they displayed at Toy Fair this year.
It should be noted that, for right now, this is only limited to the direct market and Diamond, and not big box retailers… at least, not yet. Hasbro could be testing the waters by doing this. Hopefully this plan is successful and works out well for Hasbro, so this idea can further flourish.
Check it out and discuss after the jump!
(Pictured: Transformers: Prime Robots in Disguise Deluxe Vehicon, a once-notoriously shortpacked and hard-to-find army builder.)
Somebody
They can open a Diamond account (hell, I suspect BBTS and the like already have accounts for DC Direct and whathaveyou). Pricing is a different story, but I'm pretty sure they CAN do this, at least as a backup for when the case assortments are (from their POV) particularly crap.
BenjaminXavier
Probably. That's why some Takara figures are more than others. But it really shouldn't be more than $1-$2 in either direction.
Hopefully this experiment works well with the 6" lines (SWB & Marvel) and we'll see it applied to other lines too.
Cast
I'd be interested to see how it effect the pricing if TF were put into this, given we know some dlx cost more to make than other and its averaged out over a case, if this were no longer the rule would people be happy to pay $5 or $10 more for some figures and possibly a few dollars less for some others?
grindcore138
Please say this is for everywhere! If this means that I can actually, easily buy Generations stuff in the UK from a brick and mortar store then oh my Glob, I will be so happy.
deathzero23
I do hope this is a good sign of things to come. I'm a collector of Marvel Legends too. And Carnage, Black Cat, Stealth Cap, Winter Solider & Scar-Jo Widow is still not present in my place.
(Probably our local distributor is very busy on releasing/promoting TF AoE stuffs)
blanco
Optimistic.
EightiesKid
This could be great for us, time will tell. I wonder how the business model would work for hasbro exactly, but it has a lot of potential to make fans much happier.
BERSEKAEL
thank you for your answer, I appreciate it. Could be nice if they build a pole of possible pre orders to bring back some of the most wanted old toys, but is too much to ask for.
03Mach1
Current product only.
This isn't some made to order, pick whichever mold you want from the last 30 years program. Its simply allows the smaller retailers to order the cases filled with desired quantities of currently available items.
Or so it would seem.
BERSEKAEL
is this a serious answer?
the last set of this sold on $500+ on ebay, for a second I though hasbro could include discontinued toys on those custom pre orders…
flatline72
you are forgetting that to have a direct account with hasbro there is a minimum about in the $5000 range to open an account with them….so $5000 in transformers order via hasbro is not going to be 2 rhinox and a waspinator.
you would have to order 100's of TF's in a year from them to fulfill the purchase amounts required to maintain that account via hasbro.
Pale Horse
The online retailers charge gigantic markups now even when there is NO reason to do so. They took that TF Prime shortpacked Soundwave ball, saw how much we would pay for a toy we wanted and ran with it. Look at the Skids wave of Generations at BBTS. There is no reason to charge 22-23 dollars for Skids because the whole assortment will eventually sell. Same with the Whirl case released a few months ago.
The only way this could go wrong is for the onliners like BBTS to buy out all the hot figures themselves and then mark them up to 50 bucks a piece while the owners sell a bunch on ebay to exploit the supply and demand.
I hope this actually works out so that I can avoid ordering from the online retailers at all, which is the duly deserved reward for their exploitative business practices.
Steevy Maximus
As of right now, the only lines that Hasbro is trying this on are the Star Wars Black 6" and Marvel Legends, so it isn't as though Hasbro is going to start offering single case packouts for stuff like Star Wars Saga Legends, or even Transformers.
I expect this to stay fairly limited to the 6" collector stuff for the foreseeable future.
This system will still operate on the same pre-order systems we have now, so if an item proves popular, Hasbro COULD produce more (like they are with Generations wave 1 2014)
siccoyote
I don't see why it'll be too bad, either order a standard mixed case, or order a case full of one recent figure. Not hugely complicated.
And if one figure sells lots of cases quite quickly they will know sooner if they perhaps should do another run of that figure.
joespags15
Ok, that works alittle bit more. But I still don't see why Hasbro would want to get into custom ordering. It opens them up to a world of huge shipping mistakes and, I'm just speculating, adding a whole new area for processing and shipping in their warehouses. I'm not trying to be negative, just realistic.
Fallout
is this a serious question…
03Mach1
Maybe I'm missing the point but these are not made to order. Hasbro is simply filling custom orders with already made product.
Dragonclaw
It's not going to be straight from the individual customer, frankly most of us aren't big enough to have individual accounts. What it means is that our distributors (Diamond or Entertainment Earth being the main ones) will be able to order cases of one solid character, based on orders that we place months in advance, and the distributors then break down the cases and fufill our orders just like they do for everything else