An informative article about making the first Super7 Jumbo Stormtrooper: Stormtrooper Super Shogun Packs Retro Punch

 

That’s super interesting, particularly the bit about the factory producing waterfowl decoys as their primary business. Thank you for posting it.

 

They are using a 100% authentic vinthae mold process for this item and as explained here it’s both a very difficult process with low margins for error. The price is the price. This is a vanity project for Super7, I doubt they will make any real money from it.

process explained a little here:

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See, this is the part where I’m genuinely curious about how much of this is just marketing hype. Obviously don’t have enough information to be able to state one way or the other, but enjoy assembling data points until I can form a working theory.

Based on that Wired article linked a few posts back, they’re using a Chinese factory that specializes in blow molding, with the primary output being hunting decoys. The most expensive Canada goose decoy I can find (detailed UV paint, flocking on the head, really nice surface detail) is in the $30 range (sold in packs of 6-12). Those are about 2 feet long; granted, they have fewer parts, but the paint and sculpting appears more complex. So assuming similar materials and process...

But, everyone says, this is a small batch item! The market for large plastic stormtroopers/robots/art vinyl is infinitely smaller than for hunting decoys!

But then I remember the giant Jaks Pacific Star Wars characters in similar scale, those were only around $40, and seemed to sell really well. Or that massive Godzilla back in 2014. Maybe it’s a different process, maybe the fit-and-finish aren’t as exquisite, but those toys are at the very least a spiritual cousin. I’d argue they’re closer cousins than to ultra-limited art vinyl by underground artists that aren’t of globally-recognized pop culture characters.

The S7 Jumbo Stormtrooper was limited to 500, sold for $300, and sold out very quickly. But there seems to have been a second limited run of that toy in black under partnership with Funko, and it looks like you can still track those down new... for under $200. Ostensibly the same toy, just a different color.

Part of the value calculation for me (maybe not everyone) is how much tangible, actual, physical STUFF is in the stuff I buy. Without actual information about costs from the source, all I can do are make inferences. I am absolutely willing to make allowances for license costs, a complex process, nerd tax, etc.

And I’ll reiterate - No agenda here. I don’t even know what the thrust of my narrative is, beyond “I just don’t get how they’re justifying $350 beyond an arbitrary number meant to roughly coincide with what that market has already demonstrated they’re willing to pay for vintage pieces.”

 

Good info guys. This kind of labor-intensive toy-making extends to a lot of high-end small vinyl makers as well:

Without seeing the numbers, we're all just kind of guessing.

Your questions are valid, but otaku tax aside (which I think is partly attributable to the disproportional effect licensing fees have on smaller companies), one thing we haven't really talked about is cost of labor/standard of living for the people making these toys.

The Japanese companies that are selling the $100-150ish vinyls that I'm buying tend to be small operations. Companies like Medicom often have dedicated sofubi makers producing figures for them (a number of these makers have their own mini-companies). These people cook the figures by hand as shown in the video above. This results, funnily enough, in the fact that Japanese sofubis are some of the last Japanese toys to actually be made in Japan, by skilled toymakers. To me, it's not only about an artificially sustained market driving prices up, but about subsidizing these people who do this for a living.

Part of it is hype, sure, but there's a real human cost to these toys being made.

Yeah, Bandai can crank out $10 Ultraman and Godzilla figures, but when you get one that's not mass-produced in a Chinese factory, that's part of a small Japanese production run, the in-hand difference in quality can sometimes be significant. I had a $120 Gigabrain Godzilla and compared it to a $20 Bandai one; the latter was a quintessential squishy bath toy in comparison.

When you buy a $20 Generations fig, or even a $200 MP fig, you're padding HasTak's bottom line while workers in Vietnam and other low-bid countries are eking out sub-poverty-level wages. Some of the smaller sofubi makers in Japan, I don't imagine they're rich, but hopefully, they're a bit better off. The HOW-a-toy-is-produced and Whom-we're-paying and What-we're-paying-them all make a difference.

To some, a $20 Generations fig might represent a less greedy company vs an "overpriced shampoo bottle," but it's kind of the opposite when you think about what workers are paid to make those cheap toys for us.

That said, Flynn isn't exactly an indie sofubi maker, but he's definitely not a Hasbro either. He has to support himself, his family, and his workers while selling limited-run toys and a much more limited variety and number of products than a big company. Might not be easy to make a ton of money doing that.

 

Right. And if these Jumbo Nouveau WERE being produced by artisanal garage kit enthusiasts in miniscule quantities for the love of the craft and art of the thing, I would laud that endlessly and completely understand the pricing. I buy free-range, grass-fed beef from a local farm. It’s more expensive than the factory-farmed lot beef at a big grocery store because more went into it, less came out of it, and it’s hard to scale that model. This is an ethos I support.

But the Wired article made clear that S7 is using a Chinese factory capable of producing these toys as a byproduct of their everyday production lines. Hopefully, those workers are paid appropriately for their expertise. But based on the pricing of the other items that seemed to be produced via that same process, that artisanal production tack doesn’t seem to hold in this particular instance.

 

Yeah, w/S7's other stuff like the Reactions and Ultimates, there is sometimes the feel/finish of sweatshop labor.

Are you referring to the cheap ducks being made in that factory? As far as the artisanal quality of the jumbo, I was imagining (maybe incorrectly) that one major cost for S7 would be making the steel molds. Wouldn't the tooling alone, for something like an original jumbo figure, be in the the four- to five-figure range, at least? If it's high enough, and without the benefit of spreading out that cost (I imagine a lot of ducks have been cranked out of that factory over the years), wouldn't the margins on a limited-run figure be much more tight?

 

I can only assume Super7 has gotten some good packaging experience, they just shipped the gigantic Snake Mountain, the box looked bigger than the Haslab Unicron box.

Regardless of specific quality/fit and finsh, when you bring up the Jakks pacific Star Wars stuff or anything like that sold in stores, it completely changes the game because they already have a set number, in the thousands, of figures they know they're going to sell to stores. Jakks Pacific doesn't isn't taking back the crap that doesn't sell, they made their money, deal done, move on. This prime is sold by Super7 and maybe like a dozen online stores and that's it.

Flynn was talking about the Thundertank and how people were comparing it to the Razor Crest. Razor Crest sold 28,000 and he said if the Thundertank got 10% of that mark they'd be beyond ecstatic. These things just aren't all that popular, they're probably looking at hundreds of these Shogun Primes the max. And if they're using that duck factory, the factory is probably are over charging them too to just get in line in their factory. They know not everyone can do exactly what they want. Plus just going back to those ducks, no one gives a shit if there's a bump, splotchy paint, or an error in the mold when they sell those. They're fooling ducks lol, not people. The Primes will be perfect.

 

My (admittedly limited) understanding is that a mold for something like this is likely $30-50k (weirdly enough, that estimate was from a duck decoy forum, who have a similar, parallel community of enthusiasts). That seems to jibe with tooling estimates I’ve seen in Third Party discussions here for injection molded figures with lower complexity, so I’ll run with it.

Maybe my beef is this - Rather than being an actual small-run art piece priced by necessity due to a complex process, this feels more like a mass-produced item (or at least, mass produceable item) being marketed as an art piece to justify a price tag.

Maybe it’s totally worth it, and the process to create what used to be a $15 toy has now become so specialized that it warrants $350 to achieve that same nostalgia. But I see the Bandai SOC Voltron at $300, or the ThreeZero Prime at $200, or Neca’s 18” Turtles at $120, or Dan Silva’s exquisitely produced Beasts of the Mesozoic dinosaurs at $65, and remain a bit skeptical. For me personally, the bang-for-buck just isn’t there.

 

Very informative. My perception was with the masses at first but after understanding the niche market of these products I think I can understand the target market of these collectibles.

I think it is similar to this USD21835.70 iron man sculpture Limited Edition Endgame Iron Man Mark 85 Life-size Replica (pre-order) - Marvel - Collections | Royal Selangor Official Website

 

That makes sense. I'm remembering that we had an insider from MMC here, and he was talking about how much it cost to produce Feral Rex. The numbers sounded familiar.

I'm gonna preface what I'm gonna say next by saying it's based mostly on my anecdotal experience (selling my former collection), so take it with a grain of salt. Having sold most of my MPs, SOCs, and Generations figs, along with a smattering of S7 stuff, I would say it's much, much easier to sell modern-styled figs than vintage-styled ones (like S7's Super Cyborgs or even my Japanese retro vinyl).

When I was getting rid of my stuff, I would lose maybe 20%, 30% at most on the MPs/SOCs/modern figs. Some I broke even on. Some I even made money on. The retro-inspired toys I would slash by 50% or more and would still have a hard time getting rid of.

And when it came to buying, a number of retro Medicom vinyls I've recently picked up from American shops had been heavily discounted. These were Diamond Imports with SRPs of close of to around $100, now being liquidated for $50-60, or even less. The Jumbo Medicom Daitarn 3 I purchased directly from Amazon (Diamond Imports) was just over $100 w/free shipping, even though the SRP was $750.

I'm actually happy to have met a bunch of collectors here today who are into the old-school flavor as well, but I think we're in the minority. Even in this thread, there are a lot of, "What is this shit?" type of responses, probably from younger collectors with no connection to the 70s/80s era of collecting.

Here's the thing: anime accuracy sells. Perfect transformation and complex engineering sell. Diecast sells. Cool modern aesthetics sell (like the Threezero Prime).

Doofy retro-inspired design? From what I've seen and experienced, a harder sell. The majority of Japanese toy collectors I know would much rather spend $150 on an SOC version of a character than on a retro vinyl version, even if the vinyl version is actually handmade and hand-painted in Japan.

If Flynn were to produce a massive number of Jumbo Primes in order to lower the retail cost to, say, $100-ish, there's still a chance he'd be stuck with a lot of deadstock that he can't move and that he now has to pay to house.

This was the same issue that fans had with Toy Guru when he was running the MOTUC line. People always asked why he didn't just mass-produce the figures and swamp retail aisles with them and sell them cheaper that way, and from what I remember, the explanation was that the line wasn't strong enough...didn't have that crucial *kid appeal* to justify big runs of figures.

I'm not at all saying the $350 price couldn't be lowered or that it's a great price. I'm not disagreeing with the notion that you're getting more bang for the buck with a $350 SOC Voltron. And it's possible Flynn has marked this up to prestige pricing. But I also think we might be overestimating how well a Jumbo Prime would sell in today's market.

 

Looks at price...


HAHAHAHAHAHA...

 

That's the thing though...with a super niche product like this, the buck would have to be really small to match the bang for most people. Speaking for myself, personally, I might pay 10 to 20 dollars, maybe 30 dollars tops for a figure like this as a novelty item. And only then if I happened to see it in person at a store.


So, think of it this way. Imagine you have 10,000 people who might have at least some interest in your product. But 9,000 have such a small amount of interest that they wouldn't be willing to pay enough to cover the cost of production. Meanwhile the remaining 1,000 are such hardcore enthusiasts that they will pay whatever it takes.

In that case, what's gonna be more effective? Trying to convince the 9,000 people to pay more than they're willing to pay for something they don't want that much, or simply charge the remaining 1,000 whatever it costs to produce the figure?

 

Good luck selling these $350 spring loaded soap bottles. I see these hitting $75 on black friday. 

 

The whole thing is a snake eating its own tail.

“Nobody will buy it, so we have to make it expensive.”
“I would buy it, but it’s too expensive.”

Just to close out my thoughts on this subject, here’s a toy that more closely aligns with how I’d hope / how I’d expect an S7 Prime to be approached. Under $100, small company, limited run of 300, similar design sensibilities, and I’m willing to wager the market for retro-kitsch Iron Giants is even more limited than for an Optimus.

I’m here ALL day for this:

 

Since these are being made to order according to Super7 (I’m sure they did make a few more) that would be very unlikely.

 

But this is 10” tall and made of soft vinyl. I don’t see the comparison.

 

So basically their sales model is "these collectors are used to being price raped and apparently enjoy it, so we should totally keep doing that. 2000% markup is good business".

Who are they, Takara?

 

sorry. everything these guys have made thus far is junk in my eyes.

maybe in the non poseable toy years of 1970's sure maybe they'd be cool. but all their stuff in 2021 is lame (to me).

Transformers fans aren't gonna buy everything on the planet just because it says Transformers.

If they do, they deserve to be taken for a ride.

 

I am torn on this. I really want a jumbo sofubi Optimus Prime, and I'm not completely ignorant to the economics of scale, but it still feels like too much. I am no stranger to paying irresponsible sums of money for toys, but the stars don't feel aligned on this one.

I paid $360 for Lewin Atlas. For $10 more than this S7 Prime I got a 27" behemoth that weighs a ton and absolutely owns whatever room it is in. That toy puts people's jaws on the floor when they see it. The S7 Jumbo Prime is more like a "Hey, neat!" reaction and that probably doesn't get my $350. $200 and it would be an easy buy for me. Maybe even $250.

I also agree with the poster above me re: the Mondo Iron Giant. I bought that one and the Machinder special edition.

Thank you