I get that. My thinking though is that by breaking up the sets into smaller pieces it will be an easier pill to swallow for all of us.
-Sal
I do not disagree with that at all from an idea standpoint. But from an industry standpoint its harder to pull off than you think. Separate packages, separate art/photography, separate transit tests, more skus in their order system to track, development & timeline schedules, more for their sales team to sell. Its more cost effective to sell bigger higher priced items than it is to sell several lower priced ones, especially in a high end collector market. Lower production runs & lower price on playsets that are not at mass market are very hard, if not near impossible to pull off a real profit. It becomes too high risk of an investment & can sink a company. There is a lot of development that goes into the toys we buy, most people are very unaware how involved it gets.
1 tiny section of a hallway or room can have a development cost of $50K-$75K alone with man hours, models etc. You have to make that up, pay for your production -run and turn a profit to make the venture worthwhile to pursue.
Think about it, lets pretend we are going to make Palps office, a middle sized room. Cost us $50k in upfront design/model/development. Add tooling cost of $78k. Package misc $10k.
-We already spent $138k.
-We want to retail it for a $160 playset
-Production run of 5000.
-Sideshow EXF(cost to make) $40 (including royalty to Lucasfilm)
The math-5000 units =$800,000 in overall sales if they sell directly themselves at $160 each
-5000 x 40 = $200,000 EXF
-So we end up with $200k in costs to manufacture/raw materials + $138k development (package/design/models etc) = $338K sideshow has to make before getting a profit
- Final profit to sideshow if they sell all 5000 units = $462,000
As you can see thats not much at the end of the day to a large business like Hasbro. But for a smaller company like Sideshow its not bad. Actually it should be better but thats marketing guys job to crunch numbers. If they can sell more units its like printing money. If they sell to retailers their profits would diminish so they have to sell direct, in my opinion to make this happen.
So hopefully some of that will make sense why it does not make sense to sell parts of a hallway.
I think this is a very real scenario that we can see some great display enviornment playsets. Leave the doom & gloom to politics.
WORD!