Sy-Klone & Panthor arrived at the ItsAllTrue’s “central offices” late yesterday evening. The figures came packaged in two boxes: a giant one for our Panthor order and a less giant one for our Sy-Klones. Once I had everything opened up, I was suprised to find that not all the Sy-Klone boxes were marked “Sy-Klone”…
Sorry for the tease, but I had a good laugh at myself and wanted to share. For a split second, I actually thought there might be a Battleground Teela insice. In that moment, I reveled in the thought of a scoop for IAT. But as I opened it, reality & reason took hold. I knew what I’d find: the Sy-Klone that I’d paid for. I gotta love Mattycollector. I read on the Org that some folks received a Sy-Klone in Catra packaging. Too funny! Anyway, I wasn’t disappointed because I needed that second Sy-Klone. You’ll see why in his review, coming early next week…
fookin weird.
I know they go in for parts re-use in a big way but if it starts going on with the boxes then that’s the new definition of cheap-out.
BWAAA HA HA HA HA!
Oh lordy lordy, can’t Mattel hire just ONE person who actually, like, can read and has some brains and can CATCH this sort of thing?
Look, it’s no big deal, I get it, but it’s just a DUMB error that could have been caught and it’s like…doesn’t anybody have any PRIDE in the idea of doing a job right?
Who is John Galt, man.
“Matty” is John Galt. The complaints of the parasites (reversed shoulders, bad paint, endless sculpt reuse) don’t matter so long as you keep making money from your magic railway.
I think I need to stop reading that Lois Lane twitter feed.
the funny thing is, does anyone remember when the boxes were blank? printing the name on the box is completely superfluous, and it’s a cost that will not be the first thing to go when the line starts running up against it’s real budget. we’ll lose articulation points (like dcu) or we’ll lose heads (like motu… oh, crap…) before we drop the extraneous packaging elements. cuz trust me, mattel will threaten us with the in-package items they’ll have to drop to keep the costs under control, but they won’t think about trimming the packaging and keeping the contents. remember when TB did that slim boxed packaging for the LOTR figs… a decade ago? why the hell, since motuc doesn’t include BAF parts, can’t we trim that all back and keep the toy bits? especially since the smaller card would easily fit in a padded envelope?
but it seems you HAVE to print the name on the box lest someone doing picking and packing send the wrong item, right?
Which implies inventory when this all was *supposedly* ‘made to order’ and there shouldn’t BE any inventory.
Which means to me when they do a ‘special sale’ to clear out excess bikini teela there’s gonna be some very surprised buyers… 🙂
And honestly, even tho I don’t have a dog in this fight, I would not go for padded envelope shipping. Not unless there was a serious lowering of shipping fee to make up for the crushed and mangled card and potential broken toy. Standards for taking care of items in the shipping world have slipped so low I wouldn’t trust anything in a padded envelope surviving contact with the shipper.
Sadly, I believe they’re already doing padded envelopes for single figure orders. I haven’t heard much gruff about it yet on the Org, but I haven’t looked either.
MOCers will be the first to cry foul to changing the packaging.
Inevitably the line will have to be fleeced more than most folks will put up with though, you’re right. The interesting thing will be if they’re thinking ahead and holding on to some low tooling figures. That’s what I’m looking at for DC Classics right now, it sounds like they’re in a pinch right now, so they should have a list of low-tooling characters saved as backups for just that event. DCUC18 is a good example since that’s a low tooling wave, but DCUC17 req’d more tooling than it should’ve given the nature of the wave.
first rule of “real” figure economics… screw the MOCers!! why you ask? because if you cut the contents of the box say 10%, there’s a smaller box. if you cut the contents IN the box by 10%, there’s no more product.
if they were halfway intelligent, they’d make a mailer box optional sub version that costs 13 or 15 dollars more a year than the boxed option. make the MOCers pay for their luxury, and let the rest of us not glut the trashcan w/ waste product. let’s see how many folks line up for the cadillac option when you actually have to pay for the cadillac.
Matty Collector is just teasing and annoying their fans.
I’m going to side with Dayraven on this. For a mail order product like this, if I’m going to open something, I’d rather not bother with a box that will be recycled five minutes after I remove it from two other boxes. Just pack the figure in a padded baggie and throw that in the shipping box for all I care.
Of course, if they ever do change motuc packaging, they’ll do it the dcuc way- larger, more wasteful packaging that adds nothing to the product itself (such as bigger BAF’s in the dc case).