Jedi Temple Archives Calls For A Paradigm Shift - We Second!

My friend Paul Harrison form Jedi Temple Archives has penned an articulate, well thought out and thought provoking article on the tenuous status of the action figure industry and in specific, our beloved Star Wars collector line. 

Please go there to read his article and leave your comments.

Here is my response:

I need to stress that this opinion is mine and mine alone.  This is not the consensus of the Bantha Skull community, nor is in consultation with my partners here.  Also if Hasbro ever read this, they’d probably laugh at the impracticality.

Brick and mortar retail has actually become a disservice to the collector line perhaps because they don’t seem to get the difference between the toy line and collector line.  And why should they? Billion dollar retailers should not be obsessing about the nuances of a loss leader product that moves around 100 units per store per year.  But Hasbro is forced to listen to them.  So the brick and mortar behemoths continually insist on pushing the character selection and carry forward pattern with toy line consciousness which is now too contradictory to a collector line.  If you have listened to Dorkside Toys’ obscenity laced frustrations on the Boring Conversation Anyway podcast, you can clearly see how badly the demands of these mass retailers are almost incomprehensible to someone with domain knowledge of the niche collector market.  And I am taking Hasbro at their word that Target, Walmart and Toys R Us have a lot of input on character selection and carry forward.

So that leaves one simple solution that I’ve been calling for with the collector line for a year now.  Pull the plug on brick and mortar retail.  Give up the ghost.  This may be a fait accompli anyway and a bit like me acting like not owning a complete and screen accurate Darth Vader costume is my decision.  Retail may be making this decision for Hasbro as we speak.  But it’s becoming undeniable.  Trying to sell a product to a specifically targeted audience through the gargantuan purveyors of peanut butter and cheap slacks is like using the QE2 to ship a lawn chair across the Atlantic.  It stopped making sense.

If Hasbro wants to stay in this market, and honestly I only think they should for selfish reasons, the paradigm shift Paul Harrison calls for is required.  Transition the collector line to e-tail and take direction from those e-tailers who have to know the market like the back of their hand for their own survival.  It may seem ludicrous to suggest that smaller e-tailers can take the place of the 100s of brick and mortar stores across the country.  They can’t, but if they were the only ones in the game, they could make a dent.  Honestly, how many cases has your Target store seen since 2012 anyway?  Toys R Us seems to tolerate a collector aisle, so they could be the one brick and mortar avenue that stays intact, but strip them of any voting rights!

It’s critical, that the line return to and live on the Vintage Collection cards.  I would suggest shipping the figures in protective cases again, but that would likely price too many out of the market.  Individual collector focused e-tailers can ship the figures in Star Cases as a service for those who want them.  Position the line between $15 and $20 per figure with 10 to 20 figures per year.  I know many of you will wince at that price point, but it will be cheaper in the long run.  I’ve said many times, I’ve had to resort to ordering by the case since 2011.  I’d much rather pay $15 - $20 for figures that I want than pay $10 for a bunch of figures I don’t want.  Many of you are telling me you are only buying a handful of select figures every year anyway.  In most cases it would be principal and not finances keeping someone for shelling out more for the figures.

Make the cases assortments so that ordering by the case is friendly (i.e. no carry forwards - duh).  For gap filling “re-releases” such as 4-LOM, make them chase figures.  If a year consists of two cases, each case can have two revisions.  The re-releases would appear in only one revision at one per case.  So in this scenario, we’ll take the example of FX-7 and Snaggletooth.  Wave 1 revision 1 would have 1 FX-7 figure and wave 1 revision 2 would have 1 Snaggletooth.  Yes, this might really put the screws to completists, but everyone seems to hate completists anyway (Ray Liotta laugh).

Twice a year, petition the e-tailers for individual figures from that year that they think they could sell more of.  Take the consensus top four and make a revision cases consisting of just those four figures weighing the case ratio accordingly.  This will ensure figures like Darth Plagueis get to fully serve the market and should provide Hasbro with direct empirical data of demand.  Also this case could also be used as an avenue for accessibility to the line for new collectors, but with the secondary market, that increasingly becomes less and less of a concern. In fact, Hasbro’s consciousness toward that end has become a bit of a problem with the line.

Can you imagine it?  No more driving around in vain.  Yeah you’re paying more, but you’re not wasting any gas on fruitless trips.  You’re not panicking and paying $30 for a figure on Ebay out of fear that it could go even higher.  You just sit back, pre-order two cases a year (or the individual figures you want), and wait for the plastic joy to arrive on your doorstep.

And if you’re worried about card condition, the absolute best condition cards that I have gotten are the ones from cases I ordered online and I was the first person to open it.