No, you're confusing it for Tians Return from Machinima.

All we know about RB Academy is that it's being worked on right now, and it's a pretty safe bet that it will be on Discovery Family just like Rescue Bots.

 

Oh, well then maybe it won't be as shit as I was expecting.

 

Oh I hold no delusions when it comes to Funpub's flaws. poor web security, web design stuck in 1996, unwillingness to use accept paypal, poor qc on figures, and lifting of sale limits wayyyyy to early (2016 Megatron)

even with all of that, they still put on a damned fun event. they still made amazing exclusives (Oilmaster!). and they made this fandom feel special, like we mattered. that's what i'll miss. especially after seeing the Action Master homages we would have gotten via Pete's Robot Con.

 

Someone posted that here, IIRC. They reported that it was leaving Discovery for YouTube. Hasbro has Hanasuki on YouTube now, so it wouldn't be a shock. More kids have access to YouTube than cable TV, especially a niche channel like that. Netflix might be an option for something aimed at older fans like the new Voltron, but stuff for little kids? YouTube is the way to go these days.

 

Take all of your fixed costs - table, lodging, travel, food - and divide it by your expected margin. Don't think for a second that your starting point is MSRP either. If you go through a distributor, you don't have a prayer. You'll probably still be sitting on Titans Return wave 1 deluxes that Walmart will have rolled back to $9.88 by the time of the show and obliterated any remaining chance that you might've had of finding a buyer.

I drove to Botcon 2007 so I _could_ drive to Hascon. I would be looking at a minimum of $1600. That's $1000 for the (cheap) table, $300 for 3 nights somewhere reasonably close, $200 in gas, $100 in food. I'd drive 8 hours the day before, eat Burger King quality food, and drive overnight Sunday to save on a 4th day of lodging.

On the roughly 10%, at best, margin that I had on Hasbro products, I would have to sell $16K worth of them just to break even. That's making three major assumptions - you get retail price, in cash (charge cards cost 4%), for everything that you bring. If you've ever been at a convention at closing time, you've seen dealers packing up alot of stuff. Frankly, even a 25% turnover rate is really optimistic, and that balloons the inventory requirement to $64K. Somehow I doubt a show pricing like this is going to leave alot of cash in customer pockets but let's pretend for the sake of simplicity.

Now, let's look at space.

Take a smaller SUV like a Jeep Liberty or Ford Escape (hereafter referred to as "the truck"). 62-67 cubic feet with the seats down. A case of deluxes is roughly a cubic foot. Accounting for dimensional differences...let's say 60 cases of 8 figures at $15 each is $7200. That's not even half of what you need with 100% sellthrough. Sure, you can hook up a trailer, but that cost has to be recouped at a 10:1 ratio like everything else. You could also use a box truck, maybe even a borrowed one, but those get ~10MPG if you're lucky.

Then there's the table itself. 6ft long (assuming 2ft wide) inside of a 10x10 space according to the brochure. Even if you sit the cards vertically (roughly 7x2 base), you can display a maximum of about 120 deluxes on your table. That's a quarter of the 480 that fit in the truck. You'll be able to fit maybe a dozen cases (96) under the table. The rest (264) either stack up behind you or require trips back to the truck. Shelving will increase the table display numbers at the cost of truck space.

That's assuming deluxes. For dollar to space ratios, voyagers are a little lower and leaders are a little higher. If you dump TFs altogether for, say, Star Wars Black or Marvel Legends, you stand a better shot. Not Figuarts better though.

Another difficulty is that, if you focus on a couple of brands, you will have alot of the same stuff on the table or visible behind you. Having extra inventory makes people think they can come back later and then they don't. Especially if the entry fee was so high that the average purchase approaches 1 item and there are 99 other tables before circling back. However, if you combat that by bringing 1 or 2 of a ton of different toys, you get the Tetris effect where stuff won't fit evenly in the truck or on the table. That's less of a Hascon problem than a general convention problem though.

But I want to get back to sell through. You're talking Hasbro, you have to talk assortments. They're rarely strong. For example, stores I've seen are stuffed with Blurr, Scourge, Chromedome, and Highbrow. That's because Hardhead, Skullcruncher, Mindwipe, and Weirdwolf sold. TFs usually do about 50/50. Legends and Black Series? 25%, tops, of those cases are sellable. So now you have that $7200 of deluxes in your truck and only $3600 is likely to sell. They're on Walmart rollback at 30% off and not moving. If you sell half of your stock at a 10% profit and the other half at a 20% loss, you lose 5% on every case.

You think that's bad? Pretend you brought Marvel and Star Wars instead. You're able to bring probably twice as much inventory. That's great, you can almost bring enough to make your table. Except now 75% to 83% of the case won't move at 50% retail. So every case costs you, using SWB 2016-W5 (Leia, Sabine, Revan, Kenobi, etc) as our basis, $96. Revan is a real outlier fetching about $50. More typical is something like $25 for Sabine. But let's go with best case. You get $50 for Revan and $10 each for the other 5. Congratulations, you made $4 (only $1596 to go). Realistically, using Sabine as the model, you lost $21. Remember, you can't pull any of those cute bundling tricks that big online shops get away with because reasons.

And you had to move, let's say 120 cases of SW to empty the truck and approach break even. That means you lost $2500 on the truck. Fixed costs worked in, you're over $4000 in the hole for going to Hascon.

The big dealers that fly, have stuff freighted in, and rent a dozen tables, MUST be direct Hasbro clients. Even then, I know they must be making money because they're still operating but the scale is just too much for me to effectively imagine. I've read something like $50K minimum orders to be a client of Hasbro and supposedly you don't get to just buy TF or just buy MLP. That's not something a random fan or even somebody interested in starting a small business undertakes. You have to have a real plan to push this stuff at a rate thousands per day or you will be CRUSHED long before your SBA loan comes due. Through a distributor, if you're very careful, you can limp along and collapse just past the 5-year mark.

Seriously, smaller players have to stay focused on the local shows. Pay $50 or $100 for a table somewhere within a 1-2 hour drive. It's by no means easy but it's not the vertical climb that Hascon or the various branded ComicCons are. Unless you're a super lucky scalper or flipping yard sale finds. Those models are different.

Really, when you start talking about these shows demanding thousands of dollars for a couple of days, you start seeing the same kind of math at work that prevents anybody from opening a B&M toy shop in town.

 

And that mega dump assumes that you don't have an asshole distributor like EntertainmentEarth that takes a 10-case order and ships you half a case per day for 20 days. That sort of horseshit would be difficult even if absolutely everything else was free.

 

Nothing for RID or TF cartoons in general. Guess SDCC will have to do.

 

The irony of all this is that Hascon will probably be a financial success. Big corporations don't take huge risks like this without fiercely analyzing the bottom line. They'll make money overall. and probably keep doing it annually.

 

But there's still a (small) possibility of HasCon not doing well.

 

They'll certainly make money on the suckers who go once to give them the benefit of the doubt. Those are the kids who had to touch the stove to learn that lesson. Dealers...well...they're either direct accounts that can (I guess) absorb this or like Indiana Jones being chased by a boulder. Plus, Hasbro sold all of those Hasbro products whether the dealers could move them or not. So Hasbro and the venue will make their money. If they don't, they'll write it off with accounting tricks and get half of the difference back from Uncle Sam. And then raise prices again to make up the rest.

 

Not to mention the fact that (1) a seller can't augment your table with non-Hasbro materials, and (2) you are directly competing with Hasbro itself. It's like Thursday night at Botcon - dealers were closed to attendees and the FunPub store was the only game in town. Don't think for a minute that Hasbro won't have their own merch to sell.

 

• Transformers: The Last Knight Movie Event
  Join celebrities and producers, including Lorenzo di Bonaventura and Brian Goldner, from Transformers: The Last Knight to celebrate the home entertainment release and view special Bonus Footage. Enjoy light refreshments and a special video message from a surprise celebrity.

Putting aside that seeing The Last Knight was two-and-a-half hours I won\'t back so why would I add to the lost time of my life, how on earth does Brian Goldner, CEO of Hasbro, qualify as either a celebrity or a producer? 

Pretty sure the surprise celebrity will be Michael \"killing my childhood\" Bay.

 

11:00 am to 11:45 pm - Chat with Chewbacca\'s mom

Man, she really has a lot to say. Or maybe Hascon should hire an editor.

 

I bet that Hascon is getting a mega venue discount for RI state tourism revenue.

 

It's really pretty sad that Hasbro decided that this show precluded them continuing Botcon. Looking at this lineup, there is no reason that the two shows couldn't have both remained side by side. Hasbro would probably have a much smaller presence than previous Botcons, but the show had so much more to offer than just what Hasbro brought...
Here's to hoping TFCon Reston is a big hit.

 

What you quoted specifically doesn't really have much merit to what you said but I'm pretty sure it does if you had just quoted my entire post lol. Steelbane is something I haven't got my hands on yet, as I ordered TakaraTomy's because TakaraTomy's Beserker actually holds together in vehicle mode. They use different manufacturers and hava different QC check so it's a 50/50 shot but going back to what I was saying is I believe that Steelbane is like that due to heavy parts weighing him down. And them nor paying enough attention to that. He should of either had 2 way semi strong hip ratchets, or much tighter tolerances I've seen a Drift that was fine though. Not sure what to say about that.

I ordered all wave 2 through TakaraTomy along with Takara's version of MPM-03. Which is actually different even know ppl think it's the same I posted pictures in the mpm Bee thread to show the differences in boxes. Like three quick examples out at least 5 is MPM-03 (TT) vrs. MPM-3 (hasbro) and No Chevy/NO 10th annv., VRS. Chevy/10th Annv. Japanese text ON the box (no sticker) vrs. American.

Anyways ....  

 

"Steelbane is like that due to heavy parts weighing him down"
No, its because his hips are loose. You are a troll, no longer replying.

 

You seriously have real problems. You made me extremely mad at first which I deleted because I wasn't trying to try to troll you, anyone, and I've never been a troll in my.whole life.

I thought we were just a conversation about him and if you read I said that's what "I THINK" and I explained I didn't have him in hand yet. You know what your problem is is you didn't feel like reading so you just assumed I was trolling. Read the fucking thing next time

 

Now girls, you're both trollishly beautiful.

 

Thank you