I usually love to post here when my shop secures a killer collection or just has a good overall score. But they aren’t all winners. Sometimes we make a bad decision in carrying a new line. It doesn’t happen often. To be honest, I can only think of 2 product lines that we gave a fair shot to, that ended up being complete duds. One was sports cards.
When we first opened up around 11 years ago, we stocked a good selection of sports cards. When we were growing up, comic shops often went hand in hand with sports cards. Well, that turned out to be a tremendous mistake and within a year we had decided to pull the plug on that experiment. I’m super grateful for that actually as the card market is a disaster.
The other line that ended up being a complete failure is the Hikari Vinyl Figure line from Funko. These came out several years back and started with a bang. I was never a fan of these at all, but Funko was catching fire so we have it a shot. Pops and Mystery Minis were killing it so we went all in on the next big Funko brainchild. Ugh...big mistake...
We should have realized from the start that these were destined for failure but we had blind faith in Funko. We were making a killing with the other successful lines that we wanted to support the company and their new ventures. The problem or problems started piling up quickly though. I’ll go through two major deterrents below...
- Price Point
Funko Pops base price averages around $12 bucks. Mystery Minis base prise started around $7 bucks. Hikaris?!? Try $50-$100 BASE PRICE!!! It’s just too damn expensive right out of the gate!!!
- Unoriginal & Overkill
What I mean by this is that when the line started there were only a handful of different sculpts. You had Batman, Ninja Turtles, Deadpool, Spider-Man, and a couple of others. The problem was that they just shit out variation after variation of the same characters. Blue Batman! Grey Batman! Rainbow Batman! Sparkle Rainbow Batman! Gold Batman! They did this for pretty much every sculpt and it got old immediately.
We probably spent several grand over a several month period stocking up on these hunks of vinyl shit. Nobody cared...at all. I’m not kidding. The past few years, my business partner and I make a huge deal out of it when we sell one. We are actually going to clearance them out or pack them in mystery boxes for convention sales. Not sure yet but we just want out. This will be the first line in our store that we will actually lose money on. Even the sports cards trickled out after some time. These have sat around for years. I sold one right before Christmas. The previous one I sold was in the summer. I think we sold 2 in 2018. Simply embarrassing.
One of the reasons why they aren’t moving either is I never adjusted the price stickers on them. It’s just something that has eluded me thus far. These have dropped an insane amount since they first burst onto the scene. Take this shitty Astro Boy Exclusive for example. There are only 88 in the world. When they first came out, this is what they were fetching on the secondary market.
Now take a look at what someone paid for one recently. By looking up this listing on watchcount, we can see that this sold for just $80 bucks off a listing price of $95 bucks. Ouch!!!
Oh, and that’s one of the more successful ones out there. Most of the others that we have priced at $70-$100 bucks go for $10-$30 bucks. Simply awful. Whenever I see a customer paying more than a second of attention to them I immediately tell them that if they want any I could offer them a minimum of 50% off...more if they took a chunk of them. I usually just get a “cool” from them...but I can tell they want to spit, piss, or physically drop a wet shit on them right there.
Sad part is, if they just did a couple of these and didn’t go into overkill mode...and didn’t charge a butt raping fee to start with...they wouldn’t be so bad. There are actually a few that look pretty cool and it’s usually just the basic ones. A shiny red Deadpool, the wooden looking Groot, the Blue & Grey Batman, the Stay Puft...all those are fairly nice. They are t worth what they initially sold for, but they are cool looking. But we don’t need 17 variations of FuCkInG sKeLeToR!!!!! Argh!!!!
Anyway, just though I’d point out these giant piles of steaming dung. If anyone here sees any they want...60% off sticker price AND you can pay with Steem! 70% off if ya take 5 or more!!! You’ll just have to pay shipping as well.
Fuck, I want to melt these things so bad...
Blewitt