There’s been some mildly heated discussion regarding Mattel’s decision to pull Beast Man and He-Man off Mattycollector prior to Skeletor‘s release on Thursday. For the record, here’s what Mattel had to say about it:
As visitors may have seen, both He-Man and Beastman are now sold out on Mattycollector.com. We knew a few days ago we were running low and with only a few hundred units left, we wanted to close down sales so we can have just handful for NYCC and SDCC to help spread the word on this amazing toy line at the summer conventions. (after all, the more fans we can get, the more units we can sell and the more tooling dollars we can get to tool bigger and better figures!)
We won’t have every 2009 MOTU figure available at the shows, but we actually produced more of these two figures in particular to help gauge sales. And now that we have a good idea now of how many MOTU fans are out there we can adjust future figure production accordingly.
Skeletor goes on sale at 12:00 Eastern this Thursday. (as does the DCUC Adam Strange and Starfire 2 pack and the Infinite Heroes stands). We are also working hard to get a monthly subscription service up and running for MOTUC to take us through December. (at which point the subscription for 2010 will cover Jan- Dec figures of that year).
I’m not naïve–I know Mattel hasn’t exactly won the people’s trust with their issues with DCUC and so forth. But I don’t quite get why this has made some people so suspicious. Mattel has been warning the figures would sell out for weeks.
Some fans think Mattel has some other reason for closing orders–for example, to stop people from saving on shipping by combining orders with He-Man and Beast Man, for instance. But why would they care whether people combined shipping? Wouldn’t that save them money, too? Fewer boxes and fewer man-hours spent on packing orders.
I think Mattel’s claim that they want to hold back a few hundred for conventions, to help win over new collectors, makes sense.
However, I can see a strategy whereby Mattel regularly takes down the previous month’s figure a few days before the next figure goes on sale, in order to ensure they don’t have people waiting five months and then ordering five characters at once.
Why would they do that, you ask? The problem is that with a monthly, online-exclusive line like this, the brand managers are going to need more frequent-and good-sales numbers to keep the suits convinced the whole thing is working. So they can’t afford to let people order a whole bunch every five months, because by then the suits might have been disappointed by the sales numbers and given the line the axe. You can’t just tell the suits, “Trust me-people will order!” I just don’t see that working with some executive who’s barely aware of the situation beyond the sales numbers.
And so, as long as each figures at least comes close to selling out before the next figure’s release date, it would make sense to me if they continued to pull the previous figure off the site and sell the remaining units at conventions.
Of course, one potential way to let people save on shipping while still getting accurate sales numbers is the proposed subscription service. If people sign up for the service, they could elect to have their figures sent together at some future date (similar to Big Bad Toy Store’s “Pile of Loot” option). I can tell you this, though–ain’t no way I’m patient enough to wait five months for my Skeletor or Stratos or Mer-Man…