Low Edition Size, Good? Bad? Maybe both?

Collector Freaks Forum

Help Support Collector Freaks Forum:

This site may earn a commission from merchant affiliate links, including eBay, Amazon, and others.

Josh-A-Tron

Super Freak
Joined
Jul 21, 2011
Messages
11,043
Reaction score
53
Location
Midian, Where the Monsters Live
Collector's as a group are a very varied crowd, however, the majority, at least on the forums and groups I am apart of seem to want things a certain way when it comes to the items they place in their collection. They want them pristine, even if these are made in a factory in china; they want them rare, even if they are mass produced; and they only want them bought by people like them, i.e. not flippers. Now while I could go on about each of these things I'm only going to write today about the rarity of an item.

Now for the most part, from a collector’s perspective, having a rare item is good. It makes you and your collection special, well at least in your mind and maybe some of your collector buddies. The lower the Edition size of a collectible the better! While I don't mind this mentality it truly isn't one am apart of either. For me personally as a collector being one in 50,000 to own an item is rare enough. Then again I've never been a hard one to please. That said I get the attraction, and the attention of course it also can boil down to the money. The more rare something is, the more you can ask for it in the aftermarket. People don't like to say that's why they do things but really, who are they kidding? I see far too many people use the word "invest" while collecting statues and figures for it not to be about the money, but I've already covered that subject in my last blog.

As for the reasoning behind someone's attraction to the Lower Edition sizes that's not the key issue, or at least not the one I'm going to focus on, as to why a continued low edition size is not a good thing. Statue companies, besides being a harbinger of our addiction, are a business. For any business to succeed and prosper they need growth. In order for a business to grow the demand for its products needs to grow and the companies output of product then needs to match the growth of its buyers demand. Simple economics, right? Well, not in the collectible community. How many times have you seen a forum post or Facebook post say, “With that high of an edition size, it’s not even a collectible anymore”? A stupid statement, but one made often. Truly how many other markets will companies get berated by its client base just for simply meeting that client bases demand? Few to none, I’d say.
All that and it’s not even the worst part. Not only are we childishly craving after a low number on a statue or figure base so we can feel special because we evidently have deep issues, not only are we berating the companies for meeting our demand for product with the products we love, but, and this terrible, in doing so we’re killing our suppliers.
If a company is not allowed to grow, it cannot move forward. Simply put, if we continue to try and make it so Statue Companies only produce lower edition sizes they will never be able to gain more licenses, to create more products, and they will stall, grow stale and die. Why would you continue to buy from a company that produces only few types of licenses? Once you have one of each of the characters or things in the catalogue, you’re done, unless you like collecting the same thing over and over.
For me, and I think for many of my fellow collectors, we need to stop and think about what we’re doing and why we’re really buying these things. Do we really appreciate them? If so, do we appreciate them enough to allow the companies that produce them flourish and move forward? Or are we just trying to get that special feeling we never got in middle school when we we’re picked last for the team, or didn’t get a piece of cake, or the girl or whatever it is that torments you?
Again, I’m not telling you that a low edition size is a terrible bad thing, but what I am telling you is, if you try to keep it that way forever, you may end up losing more than what you bargained for.

Thanks for reading.
 
The premis of this article is realistic and makes sense.

The trick is how does a company sell alot of items, yet support the collectors drive for rarity, and provide the details for aftermarket support for the item as a collectible.

Honestly, I think its in the variations that can be made and introduced by a company, without costing them more in producing the main mold and basis for the item.

Example...Sideshow does it by adding arms and heads to their existing package, and calling those "exclusives". This further helps SS out by getting people to pre order these items because they want the rarer exclusive.

I think Xm did it with "coins" as well. I think somewhere in between the SS and the Xm distribution model lies the best way to do it. That and its rather easy to have your production line in China make some paint color changes to 100 statues at a time as well, making the "color" variation another sought after item.

So, now imagine this......SS introduces a new....lets say Supergirl statue. The mold / pose is the same across all the statues, but they offer an exclusive with extra arms, heads, etc. Ok, nothing new there right.....

Now if they offered different costumes (lets say 5 different Supergirl looks from the history of the comic books), and the different heads / arms, an art print, coin, etc, they could probably sell 10,000-15,000, and have most of them pre ordered because nobody would know how many of each variant / costume / exclusive they were making, which costume you would receive when ordered, when the exclusives would run out, coins, art prints, etc.

You could essentially cause a small riot of interest in the piece, really not change your production costs much other than having to pack and mark the boxes accordingly with the extras, yet immediately make the piece collectible, with some of the exclusives (lets say the 1 costume everyone wants) with the coin and art print as low a production as 100-200.

I think thats how they could accomplish it all. And if you think about it, every comic character has many iterations over the years due to different artists that pencilled them, costume changes, etc. Hmmmm......
 
Back
Top