Reminds me of Japan’s Q Poskets figures, but Q Poskets have an appealing default design… Funko Pops are bland as hell.
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Good, then there will soon be more room for comics and actually cool looking figurines in my LCS again. I always hated those ugliy things and was waiting for the day they crash and burn.
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Sacrifices to the Gods of Economics.
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I agree Funko Pops are tasteless mass-produced garbage (literally, now), but please don’t throw all vinyl figures under the bus.
There’s an amazing art scene around limited-run indie figures: How Designer Toys, from KAWS Companions to Kidrobot, Became Art | Artsy
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I imagine you could recycle Funko pops into other Funko pops? Not ideal, but that way they can stay current and on people’s shelves while they think of something useful they can be recycled into. Hollow them out to use as planters to combat global warming?
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This is the part I don’t get. Why does a company keep running the factory if the figures aren’t selling and the warehouse is filling up? Is there something about mass production of vinyl figures that I don’t understand here? How does a company get to the point where they are paying to rent shipping containers to store things they can’t sell, yet still produce? What weird edge case of Good At Business is this?
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Depends on the kind of plastic being used. Broadly speaking recycling and reusing plastics is very wasteful, inefficient, and expensive. Plus reused plastics can only be reused a certain amount of times before they degrade to the point that they aren’t usable in consumer products.
I’ve been pondering on the collectible market somewhat recently. I am the kind of person that really enjoys getting the occasional collectible figure, but the fact that they’re plastic and most of them in the long-term are worthless because they’re so mass produced so they’re meant to be disposable. This really has started to bother me and i don’t know what the way forward is. If i was an artist that had the influence to make my own figures i’d want to make collectibles made from recyclable, and/or compostable materials.
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I wondered if we committed to an intense r&D campaign on technology of plastic recycling, if there be a payoff.
I assume the markup on these is intense compared to the price of production. I’m afraid to Google the price, because I don’t want big black eyes staring at me in ads for the next few weeks. I guess it’s like fashion, where they make a ton of stuff for cheap, and if they happen to be making something that’s a better seller, they make a ton of cash, otherwise they’ve just spent time manufacturing landfill material.
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It is strangely affirming, that I’m learning of the existence of funko pops just now.
Now having learned of them I also see I am ignoring the world around me correctly.
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Here’s what I don’t get and probablly why I’m not rich and why I’m ecstatic if my business makes enough money to buy supplies, pay for insurance, and leave enough to keep me living indoors and eating.
A billion in annual sales and they can’t store inventory? Me thinks we’re playing billion dollar games to pay less taxes.
“We are thrilled to cap off the year with another exceptionally strong performance during the fourth quarter, enabling us to reach a milestone of more than $1 billion in annual sales."
Fiscal Year 2021 Financial Highlights (Compared to Full Fiscal Year 2020)
Net sales increased 58% to $1.029 billion
Net income increased 595% to $67.9 million
Adjusted EBITDA1 increased 87% to $149.9 million
Net income margin expanded 510 basis points to 6.6%
Adjusted EBITDA margin1 expanded 230 basis points to 14.6%
GAAP earnings per diluted share of $1.08
Adjusted earnings per diluted share of $1.42
Total liquidity2 increased 44% to $183.6 million compared to prior year
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I don’t doubt that this is being accounted for in the most legally favorable way possible(and possibly a little more favorably than that); but, once you get beyond the point where informal conversion of your garage counts as an inventory management strategy I suspect that the relationship between sales volume and inventory storage is pretty weak.
It would be interesting to know if they ended up with product sitting in shipping containers because someone knowingly gambled and lost(the risk of excess stock was known and accepted as preferable to the risk of being out of stock) or whether someone fucked up(some combination of bad sales forecasting and inability to ramp production down fast enough); but once they get to the point of having product sitting in rented containers they are presumably just comparing the amount of money they lose by paying unexpectedly large amounts for storage but eventually selling the product to the amount they lose by just landfilling it and writing it off.
It would also be interesting to know if the fact that most of their product line is licensed characters has any impact here: the cost of the IP is probably a pretty solid percentage of the overall cost of getting the little plastic widget onto the shelf; and it wouldn’t be a huge surprise if at least some of the licensing deals aren’t just a flat “$X to touch this property” thing; but treat units sold differently from units scrapped somewhere along the line(analogous to, say, ‘stripped books’, in mass market paperbacks, where the IP costs are also a pretty substantial slice of the production costs and so there’s a specific structure in place to encourage availability at the cost of overproduction).
They can store it, it is just more profitable not to.
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See, this is why I only invest in Elvis Collectible Plates. At least you can eat off them before they retire to the flea market or used for skeet shooting.
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I can buy that it makes sense operationally not to have a just-in-time system. If they’re doing a limited run of 1,000 dolls of the guy whose foot gets run over in Mad Men, they’d need to set up a production line with custom inks and printing pads, possibly new injection-molding tools and dies for packaging etc., so it would make sense to run that line until the tools wear out and then switch to the next product. The entire run could be stored in 10 square feet of warehouse space, which ought to be manageable if it’s eventually going to sell for $10,000.
I would bet that the issue is, they’re unwilling to drop the price on lines that aren’t moving, because their market is driven by collectors and they can’t afford to signal that a bubble has burst. This is like the art industry, where it’s normal for galleries to buy their own artists’ work at auction to prevent it selling too cheaply (which is somehow legal).
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The plates will be worth a mint when he reemerges for his new Vegas residency.
Wait! Are you suggesting the market doesn’t know what’s best for consumers! Blasphemy!!! the market is simply correcting itself! All will be well, citizen!!! Never question the glorious market!!! /s
I’m sure they had people telling them the market would turn around soon and if they just produced yet more figures that they’d get bought! What’s the line about a man not seeing the truth if his paycheck depends on not seeing it? Was that Sinclair Lewis, maybe? If someone is deeply invested in the ideology of constant growth, they’re gonna ignore downturns, as that doesn’t fit with what’s “supposed” to happen…
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I used to say to our audiences: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!”
I’ve always loathed those ugly things, i just wish it hadn’t taken mega tonnage of forever plastics for the bottom to drop out of the Funko Pops market.
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… OMG what kind of deadbrains burn plastic in a camp fire 
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