Margin (from the why we sell to retail thread)

[guildofblades]

Hi Robert,

Well, actually, for our Over the Trenches game, we buy the figures locally...at a dollar store. But that dollar store only buys the figures in about once a year on one gigantic buy in and the moment we see them in stock, we go around and buy 5-10 of those stores completely out of their inventory. Done that twice now and each time our inventory has lasted about a year.

Right now our historical games don't include unique plastic figures. They are more wargamish, using plastic tokens (tiddlywinks) that we print round stickers for. Most of those games are going to full color, pre cut chit board units. But other games in our historical line will, eventually, get a plastic figures edition, as will a number of other product lines once we have the injection mold set up.

For historicals, rather than trying to make figures for an exacting period or conflict, instead we intend to make figures for an entire era. Such an "ancients", "medieval", and "nepoleonic", etc. This way we can ultimately use the same molds to create upwards of 5-10 games covering different conflicts during that "era". If I can ultimately produce 10 different games on a $2500 mold that also had $2000 in sculpting costs, then each game only has a $450 cost that I have to build into its margins. The plastic pieces themselves are pretty cheap (as low as $.005 or even lower), so a game with 300 plastic pieces might only cost $1.50 on the production side.

How to the small toy soldier manufacturers do it? Well, first, many of them use smaller plastic molding processes. Not injection molding, but more likely hand poured. For those who do have an injection mold process, take a hard look at their retail prices. A set of just 10-15 plastic figures can be priced anywhere from $12 to $30 or more. So 10 figures, each with a production cost of maybe 3 cents selling for $30. I think you can see where they are recovering those mold costs. But costs like that will never be practical for use of those figures inside a board game.

Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Publishing Group
http://www.guildofblades.com

[Valamir]

Right now our historical games don't include unique plastic figures. They are more wargamish, using plastic tokens (tiddlywinks) that we print round stickers for.

Ha!  That finally clued me in.  I knew I knew who Guild of Blades was but I couldn't for the life of me remember where I knew you from.  I've got Europe 1483 and The Arab Israeli Wars sitting on a shelf on the other side of the room, but it wasn't until you mentioned the tiddly winks that I made the connection.  Those pieces make damn fine Universalis Coins as well ;-)

[guildofblades]

Hi Ralph,

Nice to know we are so memorable. :)

Seriously though, we run into this kind of thing all the time. We very quietly do better and better every year, almost regardless of any stumbling blocks like the failure of distribution and such. The last couple of years we have began the long process of categorizing retail shops and then soliciting the ones we're interested in doing business with. Many of the stores we do initiate contact with have stocked our games in the past through the distribution tier.

Many stores tell us, "Oh, I stocked your products in the past but it does not sell. I have a bunch of it still on my shelves". Our response is always, "oh, well if you have a bunch of our older product those are probably the old editions of our current offerings. We have new editions. If you want to take an inventory of what you have left and ship it back to us, we'll give you full wholesale credit on that inventory toward stocking the current products we offer". Almost universally the retailer thinks this is great and say put together that inventory list.

Of those that do do that, 99% of the time they come back to us with an "Oh, it seems we sold it all". So far this year, in making this offer we have given a credit on exactly 1 copy of 1 SKU. That's it. Once they realize this, it is usually what we need to get them set up on our current retailing programs.

Yet it frustrates me that among many retailers they have that this perception that our products have failed in their store, when clearly they have not. And I am at a loss as to how to combat this perception. My only though is to get feedback from some of our best selling stores and get statements from them and then release those statements into a retailer newletter where the other stores can hear about the products' successes, ideally prompting them to take a closer look at its performance in their own store and arrive at a true impression of its actual sales.

Ryan S. Johnson
Guild of Blades Publishing Group
http://www.guildofblades.com