Tracking toy tariffs

[Damien]

By Ultimates being on shaky ground...

I get'cha. Yeah, I can see that concern that there's just nothing left in the tank. At the same time, in the nerd space, TMNT is a powerhouse of a license and ThunderCats is more niche but also has a pretty dedicated group of collectors. Realistically, if you have talented, creative people it's almost impossible to just run out of ideas. Now, if you fire all the talented, creative people......

I imagine they were banking on 2003 TMNT to generate some good will, but they potentially lost all their income on what may have been a needed hit. I don't know how you keep paying people monthly salaries if you don't know if the work they are doing will ever pay for itself, let alone make a profit.

The same way everyone else does. That's why I mentioned that ONLY Super7 is responding to market uncertainty by dumping 70% of their staff. Companies that aren't already utterly failing have stuff like.. money. As was said earlier in this thread, if reduced or no profit on a single wave of action figures is enough to cripple your company to the point where you need to lay off 70% of your staff after laying off something like 15% of your staff prior to that.... you were already dead in the water before the tariffs even hit.
Imagine if the tariffs didn't happen and Super7 made a profit on that wave of Turtles. Is the profit from one wave of figures enough to pay the salaries of 70% of their staff? If so... then that's a damning indictment against how badly Super7 is overcharging us. If it isn't, then that wave really didn't matter in the grand scheme of things for the company. They were going to do the layoffs no matter what.

The tariffs are compounding on several years of inflation, a housing crisis, and poor consumer confidence.

Absolutely. Definitely not denying that the economy is a fuckshow right now and luxury goods are going to get hit the hardest.

Boss Fight had previously mentioned another wave of Fraggles, yet there's been crickets for a while, now. Wouldn't be surprised if tariffs make a third wave of Fraggles too much of a risk to move forward with.

Quite possibly. But Boss Fight didn't lay everyone off. They just quietly decided not to release more expensive figures for a very niche line of toys right now. Totally reasonable and expected. Any toy company in this economic climate would be insane to not focus on their strongest brands and play patterns right now.

So, I think you are probably right about the plan to forge ahead with a year or two worth of product already designed out.

And I think once they reach the point where that stuff starts to run out they can circle back around with Deluxe re-releases and repaint variants and stuff while they hire - perhaps as contract workers instead of e.ployees - to resume design, if they still wish to.

Exactly. There's plenty of gig work in the toy world already. It wouldn't be surprising if they moved to an 'as-needed' model of employment. Especially if they also plan to limit their yearly releases to 50% of their current output. But there's a saying in business; if you're not growing, you're dying. While there's some hyperbole and stupidity in that statement, there is a truth (that I've seen repeatedly in my industry) that generally companies don't succeed once they start getting smaller. That usually means they're going to shut down sooner than later.

 

[Misfit]

The guy who talked about the tariff bill Brian showed him was Blake Wright of Toy Collectr Magazine. I'm unfamiliar with him or his magazine, though he might have some degree of insight beyond what some random dude would have. Here's a link to the video, he comes in around the 48 minute mark.

Blake is an industry insider and comes across as a pretty straight-shooter. He also goes on to, politely, kind of shit on Super7's whole business model. He obviously has cover space to sell, and he has been able to partner with Super7 in the past on at least two covers, but he comes across as a truth-teller and not the usual sycophants we find in this space.

If Super7's business model here is "We're going to lay off most of our designers because we're going to slow production to navigate tariffs. Let them collect unemployment, and hire most of them back," then great. I doubt it, but we'll see. I do agree that the Ultimates! brand doesn't look great right now. It's ThunderCats, TMNT, TOHO, and I guess music? Silverhawks seems to be close to the end, and if Brian can be believed, those vac-metal figures weren't big sellers. Power Rangers, G.I. Joe, D&D, all seem dead. Unless they're sitting on some new deals we haven't heard about, then it definitely would appear that Ultimates! as we know them have shrunk. They have yet to tap the turtles for their deluxe offerings which I'm guessing they'll do at some point and maybe that will revive some of their other stuff. Maybe the O-Ring stuff is a bigger part of their future than we think.

 

[PantherCult]

I think its possible the deal for Turtles may not allow them to do the Deluxe releases.... TMNT licensing is pretty specific and I feel like if Super7 could have been leveraging those older molds to do some Deluxe releases then they alreay would have, as those would probably sell better than the stuff theyve released as Deluxe to date.

 

[Misfit]

It's possible, but NECA have been doing $35 TMNT figures at Target for years so I would think they're in the clear (the licensing deal Super7 has with Viacom is the same as NECA's). They probably just can't stock them in the toy aisle where Playmates stuff is. Now, it's entirely possible that Viacom just plain says "No" because they are Playmates copy-cats, but their way around that could be to package them with just the alt heads to differentiate them. They probably will have an easier time with the 2k3 line, but I'm sure they don't want to go to that well when the Ultimates just came out (and stripping those down for the deluxe model barely changes the Ultimates offering for all but Mikey too).

 

[Damien]

I think its possible the deal for Turtles may not allow them to do the Deluxe releases.... TMNT licensing is pretty specific and I feel like if Super7 could have been leveraging those older molds to do some Deluxe releases then they alreay would have, as those would probably sell better than the stuff theyve released as Deluxe to date.

It's also possible they just haven't gotten to it yet. They have less reason. Deluxe releases made sense for ThunderCats because they burned through the 'regular' versions of the popular characters a long time ago, but not really long enough ago to just straight re-issue again. Another jumping on point for the big names makes sense when they're still trying to sell X-list characters from a C-list brand (respectfully, of course - I love ThunderCats).

Do they need to do that for TMNT yet? That's easily (to my understanding) their best-selling products overall. Nothing does as well for them as Ultimates Turtles. Why go back to the well just yet when the line is doing good AND when they probably knew well ahead of time (around the time they came up with the Deluxe format) that they were going to be releasing a whole new set of Turtles? They'd risk muddying the waters by re-issuing the classic ones too soon before releasing 2k3. AND we have to keep in mind that they re-issued all the main Turtles once already -and- did the GITD versions, -and- there's major variants of the vintage brothers in almost every wave.

Long-winded (as always) way of saying that they probably do plan to do Deluxe Turtles, and for a number of reasons it just wasn't a good idea/necessary just yet. With the company struggling a lot more now, it wouldn't surprise me to see it happen fairly soon. Or to see them pivot to the next Ultimates wave being cut back to guaranteed sellers and no one that might be questionable like a new design or character of lower popularity with fans. Of all the brands Super7 can work with, Turtles is probably the one least in need of stripped down 'Deluxe' releases just yet.

 

[PantherCult]

Maybe... but it is also true that Turtles is the brand with which they have the most restrictions because they share it with other licensors. I can't imagine NECA being OK with Deluxe TMNT from S7 hitting Target pegs in the same aisle as their Turtles product.

 

[Damien]

Maybe... but it is also true that Turtles is the brand with which they have the most restrictions because they share it with other licensors. I can't imagine NECA being OK with Deluxe TMNT from S7 hitting Target pegs in the same aisle as their Turtles product.

Okay with it? Maybe not. Can do anything about it? Also maybe not. After all, Loyal Subjects has 'super articulated' versions of all different eras of TMNT on retail shelves at the same time as NECA.
Honestly, the entire TMNT license is so confusing and seems to keep changing on a whim. Viacom honestly seems like a terrible fucking licensing partner that everyone is just putting up with because TMNT is too good to not want it.

 

[PantherCult]

Thats fair. But I also felt like the Loyal Subjects stuff was different because it was in a decidedly different scale and style than NECA was operating in whereas some of the NECA and Super7 stuff has been pretty close. But you're right it really could be any of the above, and could change tomorrow.

 

[Ashtalon]

I don't think we know NECA and Super7 have the same deal. Unless someone has read both contracts, you really can't say that. As others have said, the TMNT license is all over the place. Obviously, Viacom isn't against having licenses overlap and not probably isn't giving out exclusive licenses. But Playmates also has their license grandfathered in (do they just need to have something on shelves to keep the license?). It's certainly a giant web of licenses, and I'm not sure any toy company has say over what another toy company can do. It's up to Viacom, all their individual contracts, and maybe whatever stranglehold Playmates may still have.

 

[Misfit]

Brian has confirmed it's the same general licensing deal. And I mean "general" as in Viacom has a master toy license, and a general one. Playmates has the master license and everyone else gets a general license where they can produce whatever they please subject to approval by Viacom and it can't be in conflict with something in the master license agreement. It was Brian and Randy who privately worked out what each company was going to do so as not to step on each other's toes back in 2019. They're both basically at the whim of Viacom which notably reared its head when Playmates, Super7, and NECA all wanted to do a turtle van (or in the case of Playmates, re-release their turtle van). Viacom basically partitioned it out and gave each company a window they could sell their product. Generally speaking though, Super7 knows if they propose doing figures based on the '87 cartoon that Viacom is not likely to approve it because they already have NECA doing that. And vice versa, NECA can try to do 2003 turtles, but Viacom probably won't let them. It's not a contractual thing though where NECA has domain over certain retailers and iterations of the franchise. Now it's possible NECA negotiated such with Target itself to keep other TMNT lines out of the collector aisle, but I don't think they have that kind of sway (and The Loyal Subjects are already there as well as Super7 ReAction). The only license holder with something like that is Playmates who has dominion over retail toy aisles as the master license holder which they renegotiated somewhat recently (maybe just before Mutant Mayhem).

 

[Schizm]

Am I the only collector who doesn't own one single Turtles product?

No shade, just curious. I thought Venus di Milo was a GREAT addition to the lore back in the day, so I fully admit I am not the target audience.

 

[Justice]

I feel like this is the equivalent to when a stranger walks into a bar in the old west. We are all just stopping sipping our drinks and having our conversations and slowly turning to stare at you.

 

[Ru1977]

 

[AgentHemlock]

How old are you, Schizm, if you don't mind me asking?

I was born in 1984, same with TMNT, but I didn't know about them until 87-88, when the cartoon came out. So I was pretty fresh in the world when turtlmania hit and I fell hard. I had some toys of course before then but TMNT were the first toys I wanted and asked for. The video game was huge, then of course the movie - maybe the first live action movie I saw in theaters. And pizza was every kids favorite food. So it was quite an immersive zeitgeist. And because there were so many iterations of them - from different cartoons, to comic lines, to movies... there were a lot of ways in to that specific brand.

Unfortunately though I missed Thundercats, He-Man, Silverhawks, and Star Wars (until PoTF) They were in my orbit but the shows weren't on any of the TV stations I had. The toystores were cleared out of them by the time I was old enough to know toy stores existed.

The older kids on my street had the toys though and let me play with their figures when they weren't being assholes to me and my friends, lol. I got a few of hand me down figures from those IPs at garage sales, just because they looked cool. But subsequently I don't own a single MOTU or Thundercats figure, though I've really wanted to dig into the lines, the character designs are so cool. Lack of true nostalgia and that the offerings are either expensive or not really up my alley has prevented me.... so far.

 

[Damien]

Am I the only collector who doesn't own one single Turtles product?

No shade, just curious. I thought Venus di Milo was a GREAT addition to the lore back in the day, so I fully admit I am not the target audience.

Just an official announcement that Schizm has been banned. Nothing to see here.....