Do you know why Hasbro moved production to Vietnam? They were under investigation in China for several worker safety violations. these include:

Have as many as 8 people staying in one room with no hot water.

Demanding up to 130 hours of overtime from workers per month when China restricts it to 36

"Asking" local officials to ease up those regulations to let them get away with.

Not giving workers the necessary 24 hours of safety training before starting, leading to them no knowing how to safely work with toxic chemicals.

Source

What a bunch of anti-sweatshop saints over there at Hasbro!

 

I don't have a direct source but they're one of the people who had given out a lot of the leaks, one person being the one who dumped basically this year and next year's figure lineup.
Essentially the figure before adding all the changes such as different colors, new hand, minifigs, head stand, ship, and other small changes had swung the break even into very much so red.

 

That’s not what was said. All he said was that the profit may not be as much as one would think meaning the budget to do things isn’t unlimited.

 

“I'm more inclined to believe that they really aren't making money on this guy.”

 

“Too many people see HasLab and it being crowd funded as meaning "the sky's the limit!" for the budget, when no, it most certainly is not.”

If you look at the context of the rest of his post you can tell what he’s saying is that they aren’t making this crazy profit margins that people are assuming.

 

I kinda prefer the orange maw, but I don’t think the blue maw looks all that bad. If there’s an easy way to replace it with an orange maw, I might go for that, but otherwise I’m sticking with what I get.

 

If I had the money, I so would have bought that Cookie Monster. He was pretty much near life sized!

 

If you're talking about what a lot of us saw, there was a statement that HasTak didn't sell the amount of UNITS they wanted to. Which didn't mean the did not sell the 8000 minimum units (it was over 12k), but that they were secretly hoping for more than even that. That bit got blown up to mean a lot of things it probably didn't. Unless there's a quote somewhere that someone said they were in the red that didn't originally stem from that first statement, I don't think it's true. I'd be open to someone finding that quote/chain and showing it was a statement standing on it's own. But I would keep in mind that original statement otherwise, as that's the only one I remember being from any source. Everything else I remember reading is what people on this board gathered from it--right or not.

Again, I'll leave room for if I missed something.

 

Nah it's China, they make up fake news all the time...Either way I'm actually glad it's in Nam, China doesn't need any more of these types of businesses there...

 

Hasbro claims that they pay their average worker 74k a year now, but who knows how they tallied that up. Especially since people say the factories are owned by Takara now.

 

Exactly, Hasbro pays "THEIR" average worker 74k.

The toys are physically produced by other people's workers.

 

Yeah, I wonder how much Takara pays the factory workers.

 

Alright, putting this to rest. The average cost for a traditional Titan in terms of mold, plastic, engineering etc is 2 million from the get go. That does not include marketing, packaging, paint, etc. Now imagine Unicron's size and parts count compto any other Titan. Haslab Unicron more or less barely broke even. They wanted way more than 8000 buyers, but they got just enough to get him funded. The color change is not tied to him being underfunded.

It is likely for mold stability etc.

 

It also has maybe the biggest marketing push for any one figure in TF history.

 

watch how you assign blame on reports like this....

4 factories were investigated, with 4 different findings.

hasbro admitted to using 2 of these.

you don’t know which two, or which findings apply to the hasbro sites. Or even if they were doing hasbro work at the time of the investigation.... spitting out barbie heads in bad conditions one one day, could be TF parts in good conditions on another

 

Yea... but how simple it would have been to keep the maw yellow/orange.

Its like someone had one of those brilliant ideas again.

"Ok guys, children are stupid and need bright tie dye colors to draw their short attention spans!!! Better paint that Leadership TLK Grimlock Bright orange silver and gold!!!!"

Oh god did I hate the second wave of G2 figures. F*$king blue grimlock and Fruiticus....

 

It does say a lot that not long after they went "Forget this! Off to Vietnam!"

 

Painting this will not be an easy task. You would have to be an above average customizer and painter at the minimum. Removing the pieces will most likely involve removing pins, and then taking apart all of the mechanical pieces, painting them, and then reassembling them and hoping they still work after at least 2 coats of paint changing the tolerances significantly. All of those gears rubbing against the other parts, the fact that the entire area that needs to be painted is the mechanical action feature using said gears to make it work, and the fact that yellow/orange is THE hardest color to put on a darker color.

It should have been cast in the correct colors. If it could not have been cast in completely matching colors due to material type, it should have been made in the closest color possible. That would have given it a subtle bit of contrast anyway.

The other option would have been to cast it in the current colors, but make sure those pieces were toleranced for adding paint to them when they were made. If you want it all to work smoothly now, you would have to sand all of those pieces and maybe even the gears and pray your method of sealing the paint wouldn't cause paint rub.


Keep in mind you are doing this to a 600+ dollar item. I would not even dream of doing this unless I had extreme confidence in all of the skills required to do each and every step.

And if someone says it would cost too much to run those pieces in different colored plastic because they made the molds with the wrong pieces, then run those molds again with the right colors so you can save some face. Running plastic through the molds is such a small cost compared to the molds themselves. You have the molds, use them. This is supposed to be THE flagship prize of a 35+ year toyline and also represents what you will receive after blindly supporting a Haslab project.

"Sorry, we put those pieces in with other pieces in the mold that needed to be this color so now it doesn't look like what you paid for" isn't the best confidence builder for blindly putting down what to many is a house payment for something you won't see for a year or more.

I am still waiting for what else we don't know about it that could be an issue. This is just something we can see that is off.

 

It's also cheaper to pay people in Vietnam than in China, so that was most likely the reason they moved production.

If you wanted sympathy and rally cries for the workers, a forum where we simply buy the toys produced there and don't question where it's from is not the place.