The Snowtrooper Achieves The Rare Double Sell Out

We don't have great visibility into how well a given figure sells right away. Usually we only know this in hindsight, and that's determined by whether or not that figure goes on sale or clearance, or how long a particular figure stays in stock on the primary market. We can probably determine that Moran Elsbeth wasn't a great seller by the fact that price hit $10 at one point, and it's still available directly from Amazon nearly a year later. I'm not trying to pick on that particular figure. It's just a 2023 figure that I knew was still in stock off the top of my head.

As I said, that's looking in hindsight. There are a couple of metrics that can give us some real time feedback provided that the conditions are met. One is if the figure pre-sells out on Pulse. The Snowtrooper achieved that feat sometime between Thursday evening and Friday morning of last week. This means that it took well under 48 hours to pre-sell out despite the three per customer throttling:


Just as by way of comparison, all of waves 1 and 2 of 2024 are in-stock on Pulse as of this writing. This includes the 100% newly tooled figures of Dooku and Huyang, as well as the Phase I Clone army builder. I need to stress, again, that I'm not picking on these figures. I'm just trying to find recent measuring sticks. It should also be noted that Huyang did initially sell out during the pre-order window before more became available. As did both Kanan and Ezra, which are also both in stock. So, we can probably expect a restock of Snowtroopers at some point.

Another useful metric that can be used is the "sold in the last month" indicator on Amazon. This is an invaluable tool when judging the relative performance of figures that go up for pre-sale at the same time. The Snowtrooper was the #2 best selling action figure on all of Amazon last Wednesday, so I was eagerly awaiting for the sale number. To my shock, the Snowtrooper sold out before that number could even be gathered:


Now this is somewhat unprecedented. Combined with the anecdotal evidence from our affiliate account sales, it's safe to say the Snowtrooper is a huge hit. I mention this because, even though they are still somewhat rare these days, newly tooled OT figure seem to trigger a corner of the community with accusations of catering to the "OT purists". I'm sure I would be considered an OT purist even though PT and video game figures have placed highly on my wish-lists for years.

The truth is that, if anything, Hasbro is catering to sales. I'm not saying that all OT figures sell, but the right ones do. I feel they are the safest releases for Hasbro these days. VC316 - Princess Leia is the only 2024 figure that is sold out on both Pulse and Amazon to the best of my knowledge, and guess what other figure pre-sold out on Pulse (the only sold out figure from its wave):


Because the internet has a tendency to be frustratingly reductive, I need to state that in no way am I saying the line should be OT only. The line will die without variety. The PT absolutely needs representation. As I wrote at the beginning of the year HERE, Revenge of the Sith, was the second most critical source for Make the Main, and now with the announcement of most of the Episode IV mains, it's number one. New media needs representation too, but it needs to be done carefully, perhaps with a little hindsight first to determine the demand. We need everything. But one 100% newly tooled OT figure every other year wasn't enough. It's good for the health of the line that 2024 is getting more. These figures sell.

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