McFarlane Toys, the company owned by comic creator Todd McFarlane, has had a long history and reputation for increasing the quality of design of action figure dolls. However, of late, the company have had a few problems. And has internally announced a third round of redundancies far more severe than the previous two.
The company is split into two, design studios in New Jersey and administration in Arizona offices. Ed Frank, President of the NJ group and founder of the original company before it was bought and renamed by Todd fifteen years ago read a letter out to the New Jersey staff.
The studios will see forty staff drop to thirteen. Major operations will be shut down, including the mold, paint, sculpting, and model departments.
The only department to survive will be the digital department, and only two of its members will be held on, and a couple of traditional sculptors are being trained up to handle digital sculpting.
The plan as it currently stands is that most new sculpts will be scans of actual people, cleaned up digitally, armour and accessories assembled and added digitally mixing and matching from other sculpts, and then the files sent to China for 3D printing, cleaning, touching up, sculpting, articulation and the rest. New Jersey will only generate digital output from now on.
The New Jersey complex will be reduced from four buildings to one, with the equipment either being sold of shipped to China. As for Arizona, they will shrink from seventy people to around thirty-five.
The phasing out of staff will occur sometime between now and June, though no specific dates of personnel of departments have been given.
-- McFarlane Toys has not made any statement to these changes but the general feeling from their Staff is that these arrangements will only be temporary. More information as it becomes available.
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