[FONT="]Its lovely to read stories about ME, we like to hear stories and the level of creative talent used in their crafting is noteworthy. [/FONT]
[FONT="]Now we would like to tell a story, a story about YOU. In this story YOU is a fictional group of well meaning people who banded together to share their love of Doodads, one day a company, lets call them THEM announced that they would produce some replicas of the Doodads and invited YOU to buy those replicas and encouraged comment and feedback on those replicas. THEM produced their first Doodad and it was very warmly received by YOU, and enjoyed relatively good sales. However in any other commercial business production of Doodads would have stopped at that point, as the risk versus reward factor was relatively high and people who sold to Doodads in their stores, lets call them THE OTHERS did not consider the Doodads to be hugely important to their overall business. However THEM were in the risk business and understood that passionate and valuable groups like YOU could help support and grow brands, and that THE OTHERS might be pleasantly surprised by the results. THEM then proceeded to make other Doodads, however sales of these Doodads were very disappointing, and got progressively worse, however the vast majority of YOU continued to enjoy the Doodads. Some of YOU rightfully pointed out issues with the Doodads that they were not 100% happy with and these suggestions were warmly received by THEM as part of an ongoing refinement process. After all the Doodads were quite complicated and expensive and THEM always juggled a difficult balance between trying to replicate hand made bespoke pieces as commercially produced products. Then the villain of the piece enters…. Economically the world in which YOU, THEM, and THE OTHERS lived in got a little shaky (this is a family story so we will be a little rose tinted about the whole mess so as not to scare the youngsters, but be under no illusions this is scary) Because of this and quite understandably YOU became a little less likely to commit large sums of money to Doodads, and equally understandably THE OTHERS became even less likely to want to invest large sums of money in Doodads that may sit in their shops unsold. Now a short sub-plot THEM had always had problems getting Doodads made, sadly there were not very many Doodad makers out there and finding reliable ones was tough. There is not a lot of money in Doodads, so Doodad factory owners were far happier to convert to Whatsamacallits or Whogiemaflips than make Doodads and the economic problems only made this even worse. So, to cut a long story short Doodas were a tricky issue so THEM decided to take a close look at Doodads and their potential future, should they continue? Should they be cancelled? Should they go on hiatus until better times? Who better to answer these questions than YOU, nobody. So THEM reached out to YOU trying to be as honest as possible, and attempted to accurately gauge the true market for Doodads. Now the King of THEM said to the internet elves at THEM HQ, ‘Don’t bother it will be a total waste of time, they will do nothing but complain about what should have been and will make up mean and nasty stories about us.’ But the elves were naughty and did it anyway as they wanted to stay in communication with YOU… and how did the story end? Well the last chapter has yet to be written, but having seen the early drafts here, we hope the King of THEM was not right. [/FONT]
[FONT="]Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and yes, we could have done things differently or perhaps better, but we cannot change that now. What is important is the future and how we go forward. Nobody likes to be the bearer of bad tidings or give bad news, but honestly folks its tough out there. Its brutal. We do this for a living, it puts food on our tables and pays our bills. Its not a game, or a joke. So lets have some FACTS[/FONT]
[FONT="]1)[/FONT][FONT="]Gonzo and Animal have been very disappointing. We have attempted to push sales by drastically reducing the prices and they are still very slow.[/FONT]
[FONT="]2)[/FONT][FONT="]We showed Fozzie at all major trade and public events in 2007 and early 2008 such as SDCC and got absolutely ZERO interest from potential buyers. It was too big, too expensive and too risky were the common complaints. We did not even get a glimmer of interest, sure lots of people loved him, as we do, but were not willing to translate that love into an order, which in the cold light of day is what matters. The few retailers who did choose to speculatively list Fozzie as a pre-order had similar lacklustre results.[/FONT]
[FONT="]3)[/FONT][FONT="]Believe us we have tried and tried and tried to get our Muppets posers in with every possible stockist, all the ones that have been suggested on this thread, turned the range down flat. They see it as simply too specialist.[/FONT]
[FONT="]4)[/FONT][FONT="]We cannot find a factory who is able to produce Fozzie to the standard and quality that you and we both require. We want to meet or exceed expectations, and do not want to face similar complaints to those we faced with Gonzo and Animal on accuracy and authenticity. We will not simply throw out a sub-standard Fozzie out there, or any product for that matter.[/FONT]
[FONT="]5)[/FONT][FONT="]Its not just a quality problem, it is simply an availability problem. A total of 3,631 toy exporters in China or 52.7 percent of the entire industry's businesses shut down in the first seven months of 2008. It is a bloodbath out there. Many of our long term partners are no longer in business.[/FONT] [FONT="]
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7670351.stm[/FONT]
[FONT="]6)[/FONT][FONT="]If you do not pay your bills you do not get product. Its quite simple, we won’t bore you with the details of how the toy trade works. Just look in Wikipedia under Letter Of Credit or LC if you are interested. In most cases we have to effectively pay up-front to have items produced and this is why we always try to avoid producing anything before we have a firm number of orders or a definite idea of demand. Expensive unsold products sitting in warehouses means you go out of business quite rapidly. [/FONT]
[FONT="]7)[/FONT][FONT="]Marketing toys is a catch 22, economically you cannot afford to spend marketing $ promoting a product that will have limited results , there simply is not the margin to pay the costs. However without marketing results will be limited. Sadly with specialty products this is even more the case. We only have limited resource and would rather put that into products and packaging than potentially waste it. So we rely heavily on viral and direct marketing for these products. We think that we have effectively reached the vast majority of the target market for our Muppets products. [/FONT]
[FONT="]8)[/FONT][FONT="]This is also born out by the response to the Fozzie polls if we are hugely optimistic and combine all results from various forums into one it would lead us to believe there are less than 200 globally who want Fozzie. So lets be hugely generous and double that. We are still 100 away from even a semi viable edition size of 500 pieces, let alone an edition of 2000+. Producing 500 pieces if we could find a factory would mean that any costs on packaging, shipping, tooling, moulding or any production whatsoever are then divided across 500 rather than 2000 and this means a higher $ unit price out the factory. [/FONT]
[FONT="]9)[/FONT][FONT="]We are investigating the potential of producing Fozzie and other posers in a semi bespoke method, having them effectively hand made to order, perhaps even in the USA or other locations for individual domestic markets. We are talking to all the right people. HOWEVER and read this carefully, firstly the prices that have been proposed so far would shock you, and that’s just the cost to us. This is a specialist craftsman-led business that takes many, many hours and sadly that means $. Additionally we are restricted by the terms of our license and cannot simply do what we want, everything has to be approved. The practicalities of retaining consistent quality through this method are haphazard to say the least and it is highly likely that we will be prevented from being able to do this, but we are looking at it. [/FONT]
[FONT="]Our feeling is that the Posers line is a dead end in its current form. It simply does not have the ability to support itself economically. Prove us wrong or suggest other ideas. We know the Muppets is great, we love it too, and we know that demand will grow over coming years. But are posers the right way to service that audience? [/FONT]
[FONT="]Let us know directly, you can call or email, and if anybody thinks they might know somebody who can get batches of these things produced in say 50’s lets hear from you. [/FONT]
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