Did
Todd McFarlane just prove that the big box retailer is now obsolete when it comes to the world of action figures?
Todd McFarlane is largely attributed as the person who created the action figure collecting demographic in this country in the early 90’s, when he launched his little toy company now known as
McFarlane Toys. A toy company that gained notoriety, not by making cheap toys for young kids, but by delivering highly detailed pieces of art in the form of an action figure. Something that would attract consumers both young and old. He proved that there was profit to be had for toys other than just catering to the now shrinking demographic of young kids and the parents who buy them. Even the larger toy corporations like
Hasbro and
Mattel eventually started to follow his lead to make stuff that was geared more towards the adult action figure collector.
Back then, there were a lot more options for these toy companies to sell their products. No longer was the selling of action figures just confined to the likes of
Toys R’ Us and other toy-specific shops. Now you could find toys at various music and video retail stores, even in comic and specialty shops which were a growing and thriving business in the early 90’s.
Since those early days, the retail landscape has changed drastically. Most music and video stores are all but extinct, as are most toy-specific stores. Even video game stores seem to be on their last legs these days. Comic shops also have taken huge hits over the years, calling into question their chances of long-term survival.
Beyond a few smaller etailers, that really only leaves the big-box retailers like
Walmart, Target and a few others to sell these things — meaning they dictate what gets made, how it gets made and what doesn’t get made at all.
These big-box retailers, and the demands they appear to place on the toy manufacturers, contribute to the biggest complaints most collectors have when it comes to collecting action figures. Cheap quality to keep the price down, the same big-name characters rehashed over and over, hard to find store exclusives, and limited availability of the things people actually want. To me it comes down to this. Because the manufacturers have so few options where they can sell their products these days, they have no choice but to abide by the demands that the big box retailers place on them. Perhaps that is about to change though, and the path to that change may be led by the same man who helped create the action figure collecting market all those years ago.
Yesterday,
Todd McFarlane launched his very first crowd-sourcing
Kickstarter campaign for a newly designed
Spawn figure. A figure that pays tribute to the very first Spawn figure he did in the 90s. The Kickstarter has a funding goal of
$100,000 over the course of 30 days. In just under
12 minutes of the
Kickstarter going live yesterday, the figure surpassed that
$100,000 goal. As I type this, the
Kickstarter, which has been live for less than 24 hours, has obtained
$716,034 in funding.
Now
McFarlane isn’t the first person to look to something like
Kickstarter to sell an action figure. He isn’t even the first major toy company to do it. In recent years,
Hasbro launched their own crowdfunding website and sold several large and expensive type items straight to the consumer through it.
Mattel tried their own variation of this concept for
Masters of the Universe through their
MattyCollector website, which lasted a number of years. Had
Mattel put more emphasis on the customer service end of that operation, it probably would have been even more successful than it was.
Still when it comes to the world of action figures, I don’t think I have seen anyone have quite as much success with a crowdsourcing campaign as
McFarlane seems to be having with his first. It really makes me wonder what this could mean for the future of how action figures targeted to the adult collector are sold.
McFarlane himself has already touted if this first campaign was successful, it would allow him to get more of what collectors want into their hands by circumventing the big box stores.
Of course, until the final product is actually delivered into the hands of the consumer, it is hard to say how successful this will really be, but it definitely gives me some hope for the future of the hobby.
