The problem is, when I say “sitting on a gold mine”, I mean “complaining about this chair being uncomfortable”.
Here is a randomly grabbed link for statues/models that are anime-themed. Note how the statues run from $70 to $200+.
Here is the Toys ‘R Us selection of My Little Pony toys.
Obviously, there need to be some cheap toys for the little kid market to buy the toys. But… Hasbro has, perhaps inadvertantly, attracted a large market of people to whom $70 for a high-quality resin figure of a beloved character is cheap. And what they’re producing is shoddy toys with outright errors. There’s a Rainbow Dash toy that has some unrelated Cutie Mark on it instead of the rainbow lightning bolt. I have yet to see one which gets the hair color right (she’s got a complete rainbow in both tail and mane in the show, the dolls tend to do red-green hair and blue/purple tail).
The thing that’s frustrating here is the complete failure of the Hasbro execs to realize that they could be making more money by selling better toys. This shouldn’t be a hard concept. I dunno, were kids’ toys always this crappy? I didn’t get many when I was a kid, and the ponies of back then were, to put it mildly, not aimed at a broad market.
If Hasbro were smart, they would hire Lauren Faust to do “whatever the heck you want”, give her a budget, and make toys for it. Good toys. They’d make a fortune.
Comments [archived]
From: Dave Leppik
Date: 2011-08-05 14:04:54 -0500
Mattel figured this out with Barbie and started making $100+ collectors sets. Saw those in Target years ago, on the top shelf above all the other Barbies.
And need I mention the $100+ Star Wars Lego models with far more pieces than a child could ever deal with?