Tracking toy tariffs

RicksNerdLife said:
If your entire company's workforce rides on a singular wave of figures getting hit with tariffs, you were never in all that great of a position as a company, anyway.
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Agreed. Like, obviously it's bad for any company. But if one wave taking that hit results in you having no choice but to lay off 75% of your staff? Welp... you had been fucking up for a long time before that.


Misfit said:
When you run a company that is constantly producing new inventory, you're always funding projects with whatever cash you have on hand. Super7's model isn't really any different from anyone else, we're just exposed to it.
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It's generally forward motion, not backward motion. You put up a pre-order and use the funds from the pre-order to fund the final production, along with profits from the previous production. Super7 is doing it the ponzi way; opening up a new pre-order in order to gather up funds to finish production on the previous pre-order. That's a no-no in every company I'm aware of.

Even in my line of work - I can't imagine asking a client to pay up front for some work I'm going to do next week so that I can afford to buy the materials to finish up the job I'm already doing. It's not unheard of. The issue is that when a company starts doing that, it's an incredibly bad sign that your cash flow is flowing the wrong way. And unless you get a big payout on something, you're basically on borrowed time.


Misfit said:
What's killed Super7 isn't hard to figure out: high price, low quality. That's pretty much it.
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I'd agree with that. Ultimates, in particular, have always been very poorly managed, but I think MOST of the problem can be traced back to this.


RunestoneCowboy said:
I know he's already been pushed to the side and is no longer calling the shots at Super7, but whoever took over doesn't seem to be doing much better. Their reputation is so tarnished at this point that I'm not sure there's really much to salvage.
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My, limited, understanding is that Super7 has basically the same problem it's always had. They went from their flagship, most profitable products being produced by a guy that doesn't even like them, to being comittee run by a bunch of people that don't like them. This is a company that makes most of its money from collector-focused articulated action figures where no one in the upper echelons gives a shit about collector-focused articulated action figures.



TheRealSmallville said:
I would have been fine with the higher-priced larger characters if Snarf had evened it out at $30-$35, but $55 was just robbery. And of course, by that point, what are you going to do? Not buy Snarf? He completed the team, so we were all stuck. I did skip on Snarfer, though. And outside of a few of their TMNT offerings, I've largely avoided those as well except for the stuff that hit clearance a while back.
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They basically did this with TMNT, too. We were always told that some smaller or re-use type characters will appear at the same price, but keeping the price consistent with those 'lesser' figures allows them to maintain the same pricing on figures that are larger or have new sculpts. And that was true at the beginning, where Leo was the same price as Beebop. But as the line went on - the filler re-use figures were the same ol' 55 dollars, but new sculpts and large figures (Scumbug, Robo-baddies) were 65+. As usual... Super7's biggest problem was greed and treating their customers like idiots.


RicksNerdLife said:
Well, what truly killed then was overproducing, I would say.
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I mean... it's gotta be one or the other, right? That was always my core problem with Super7's approach and Brian Flynn's stupid fucking mouth-noises: Pick a lane. Either you are a boutique toy company making limited production figures for 55 fucking dollars, OR you sell to EE, BBTS, and every collectibles store in fucking North America. It CAN'T be both. If you try to be boutique but your toys are everywhere, then the perceived value tanks and you bury yourself.

That isn't too say I believe 'make fewer toys and make them harder to get' in order to artificially boost the value. I think they should have lowered prices and admitted what kind of company they actually are.
 
I hope the designers that all got laid off by Super7 find new work and stability soon. There were a lot of great sculpts in the various Ultimates lines held back by every other aspect of the final product, as well as by the company itself. Very curious to see where all those artists may end up, and if Super7 ends up shutting down, where the licenses end up as well.

As for who would get those licenses, I honestly don't think there's a bad option out of any of the major players in the 6 inch action figure scene. 80's properties are really hard to screw up action figures for if you have any understanding of what you're doing. Jada is everyone's sweetheart though, and I'd love to see them on Thundercats and 2003 TMNT. Personally, I'm still waiting on someone doing Galaxy Rangers.
 
If Super7 were to shut down I imagine the Thundercats line might get picked up Mattel. Turtles is already pretty much everywhere so I don't think it would really matter. After that I don't see many licenses that would be of value to other companies considering they seem to have bailed on the Joe and TF lines (outside of O-Ring+).
 
And Hasbro already did an extremely inferior animated Dungeons and Dragons line. That's the only thing with Super 7s possible demise that I'm really upset about. Their D&D figures just make the Hasbro ones look like trash to me. The Hasbro's are also extremely prone to breakage, at least the first wave. I was looking forward to eventually selling those off.
 
Just saw a news hit that Walmart has announced (ahead of earnings call) that prices will be going up by the end of May or early June by the latest. Thanks to tariffs of course.

Also Loblaw (Canada's largest grocery chain) has said that their pre-tariff inventory is almost gone and as such prices on at least 3,000 items will be going up shortly as well.

So I imagine this is just the first, of many, dominoes to fall around price increases.
 
canprime said:
Also Loblaw
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Bob Loblaw?
images
 
Damien said:
It's generally forward motion, not backward motion. You put up a pre-order and use the funds from the pre-order to fund the final production, along with profits from the previous production. Super7 is doing it the ponzi way; opening up a new pre-order in order to gather up funds to finish production on the previous pre-order. That's a no-no in every company I'm aware of.

Even in my line of work - I can't imagine asking a client to pay up front for some work I'm going to do next week so that I can afford to buy the materials to finish up the job I'm already doing. It's not unheard of. The issue is that when a company starts doing that, it's an incredibly bad sign that your cash flow is flowing the wrong way. And unless you get a big payout on something, you're basically on borrowed time.
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Do we know that Super7 is actively doing this? With factory production, I would assume there are barriers to operating this way since they must have to pay the factory upfront some amount to begin production. What that amount is I don't know, but I would assume when they closed preorders on that last wave of turtles I assume a chunk of that immediately went to the factory to begin production and upon completion they probably have a remaining balance to pay out.

I don't have a particularly high opinion of how that company is run so nothing would surprise me. I do think there is some element of risk aversion to a lot of what they do which makes me skeptical they would open preorders on one product explicitly to fund another, but people do stupid things when they get desperate. I'm largely left to assume nothing particularly shady is going on with the company and that this is a pretty conventional case of "bad times." Their cashflow has likely been going down as business doesn't appear to be very good from the outside looking in while expenses are rising pretty much across the board. And while it's easy to look at the company as this poorly run entity (which I think it is), few companies budgeted for 145% tariffs on their products. Now, if in light of all of this the company suddenly declares bankruptcy and we find out their most recent closed preorders never went into production then I would certainly be willing to jump to the conclusion that they never intended to go into production and those last few rounds of preorders were done just to generate revenue and then protect themselves from having to pay out via bankruptcy protection. And if that were to happen the individual consumer who preordered product direct would almost surely be boned as bankruptcy court is going to take of those with the largest outstanding balance first likely leaving nothing for the guy who is owed $250.

That Hasbro news is interesting, but probably not good for our hobby. I'm curious if the plan was to raise prices across the board to offset some of the losses to tariffs on products coming out of China, but with the reduction in the tariff amount, maybe they think they can just shift all of the burden specifically to the Chinese products? The article mentions price increases are still likely to happen, just not at the scale previously thought. Obviously, not enough to keep their old plan, but maybe instead of a Legends increase to $35 they think they can do a softer one of just a few bucks. I guess we'll see, but a 30% tariff rate isn't exactly a win just because it's better than 145%. I personally still expect to see a bit of a pause on new production as this thing plays out. Companies are going to rush to get product out of China that was already finished or nearly finished, but may still be hesitant to greenlight a wave of action figures that won't ship until the end of the summer.
 
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I haven't seen the newer seasons, but the first three seasons of Arrested Development were some of the most tightly written comedy episodes I've ever seen. One of those shows that packs as many jokes in a scene whether the audience has stopped laughing from the previous one or not. Also, if I'm not mistaken, one of the first sitcoms with extreme attention paid to continuity.
 
altcunningham said:
Wow, didn't know about the production stoppage.
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After years of it being a pain for international collectors to get certain things from Hasbro, it'd be wild (not fun for us in the US, but wild) if they go through with making some things for international markets only and suddenly US collectors have to jump through hoops to get rarer things. (I'm currently putting together a box of BAF parts for a friend in Sweden for products that just never showed up in his region that were everywhere here.)
 
Ru1977 said:
I haven't seen the newer seasons, but the first three seasons of Arrested Development were some of the most tightly written comedy episodes I've ever seen. One of those shows that packs as many jokes in a scene whether the audience has stopped laughing from the previous one or not. Also, if I'm not mistaken, one of the first sitcoms with extreme attention paid to continuity.
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You didn't miss a whole lot not seeing the newer seasons. They were okay but a definite dropoff that suffered from the fact that a lot of the cast wasn't available to film together.
 
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