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« on: September 11, 2021, 10:45 AM »
I think the problem with the Star Wars line of late has been the lack of the kind of collector mentality that all of us using these forums built over the years. During the 30th AC, Legacy line, Clone Wars line, and the beginning of the Black Series, the Hasbro Line Lead was Darryl DePriest, a hardcore "army building" style collector himself. When he left it switched off to Steve Evans, a very outspoken and fan-connected collector who barely got a chance to reboot TVC and launch the Sail Barge HasLab before being shifted over to the Marvel team.
From him we switched to Patrick Schneider, who I have not heard is himself a collector at all, in fact I have no knowledge of the man outside of his marketing speak. As far as I can tell from how the Star Wars collector lines have developed the last two years, his strategy for a successful collector line is to mimic the profitable Funko Pops model: leverage repaints in the main line, create new sublines consisting of repaints (or "expressions" as he put it way too many times Wednesday,) and develop new figures and tooling with a priority weighted towards future reuse of the molds in repaints and other "expressions."
I am not saying it is not a viable strategy to continue the Black Series and Vintage Collection lines, but it is very different from the mentality of the previous 15+ years--a period that contains what most of us consider the "golden years" of the modern line.