Hellscream9999 wrote:Emerje wrote:william-james88 wrote:Just something I wanted to mention since there is often debate on two things:
How big of a chunk are we collectors in the mainline transformers market?
What do big box retail stores think of Hasbro selling the same products they have directly?
Well the second question was asked specifically at the last investor meeting to the CEO of Hasbro Brian Goldner.
Goldner precised that their efforts with Hasbro Pulse was only to offer a direct market to the collectors and it was only targeting that segment. Thus there was no conflict/competition with big box stores.
That answers both questions to me. The US collector market (meaning anyone reading this article) is significant enough to warrant investing in an interface to serve fans but not big enough for Walmart or Target to fear any loss in sales from Hasbro selling directly.
We could have guessed that, but it was fun to have at least one question that's been asked openly on these boards before answered by Hasbro's CEO.
It makes sense. Hasbro (and Takara Tomy for that matter) has been pretty disgruntle over TRU closing so many stores and said in their last financial report that they didn't make back nearly as much from their toy liquidation as expected. On top of that they're being public about dissatisfaction towards retailers cutting back on inventory rather than increasing it to fill TRU's void. It makes sense that they would rebrand HTS as a collector's market rather than depend on a store like Walmart that can't decide if they want to carry every size class or not. I just hope they make good on the promised membership deals and actually put some old stuff on clearance to keep things interesting.
I do have to wonder what happened to all the kiddy stuff that didn't make the transition over to Pulse from HTS.
Emerje
Interesting thought, but by opening preorders this far in advance and paying up front, this could allow Hasbro to place custom orders so they have no leftovers after the retail cases go out, kind of a clever business model, I feel
Also HTS isn’t going away that we know of, it’s still undergoing construction, I think they want to make the distinction between Hasbro pulse being for “us” and hts being for “everybody”
The Model Railroad Industry has been doing this for years and frankly, it sucks. Granted, train models are much more expensive than our Transformers, but 1) if you don't have the scratch right then and there, thats it you lose out unless it hits secondhand market, and 2) it forces the Retailers to assume liability for Supply. If somethung ends up being a surprise smash, oh well, sorry bout cha. Shoulda tried harder to get in. That may not be as much of an issue here though, because the retailers in our case are HUGE players abd not mom-and-pop shops, but do ypu really want to rely on Walmart to establish Supply for Demand?
The answer to that is no. No you don't.
And I admit, its a little bit apples to oranges because we are talking about $20 items vs $300 items and a difference in retail, but the mechanics are the same. The only person an MTO order scheme is Hasbro, who doesnt have to hold the excess inventory.
Then again, maybe they already are, because I bet they base their production runs on recent retailer purchases, so maybe they dont have much excess outside warranty repairs anyway. But I still hope we never see that implicated here.
) and I sawed off his head and put it on again with a ball joint. So he has a fully articulated head now 
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