Quote:
Originally Posted by Hanky Panky
Sorry to hear that Diamond and Sideshow couldn't partner with Dean. Bummer!
|
First of all, this an Electric Tiki project, not a Dean Yeagle project. We approached Dean, not the other way around and we pay for everything. Diamond and Sideshow have zero to do with it and neither have ever produced a Mandy statue (nor have they indicated that they would be inclined to do so). We offered it to Sideshow to distribute, they declined. We decided at that time to self distribute, so we didn’t bother to solicit through Diamond or Entertainment Earth. It’s also why we decided the edition sizes before solicitation. 500 statues seems "kind of” manageable.
Again, RE: international shipping—When these are sold , there will be no room for exchanges. We are producing a few hundred, not a few thousand. So shipping an item to say, Europe or Asia and the customer takes a macro lens to within an inch of the ribbon in her hair and complains about the paint job and then expects us to eat the shipping cost back it could get quite costly. I guess it would depend on how picky a collector you are. In our history, we’ve had very few returns. And usually the returns were specific to a particular statue which were problematic from the start. Our distributors had departments that dealt exclusively with shipping and returns, we unfortunately, do not. This is gonna be new (again) for us. We are leaning towards shipping internationally, but this is a nagging fear we have. I think in past comments international forum members have said they’ve had very few problems receiving Sideshow’s products, so that is comforting. We are having our statues manufactured using the shipping cases that Sideshow uses, so hopefully breakage will not be an issue. But also, shipping something across the US is much different than shipping to the other side of the world. I also know as a collector you want what you want the way you want it when you want it (run-on sentence apologies). I know as I am a collector myself, well a “recovering” collector. Going from collector to manufacturer you have to think differently and ultimately make the smartest decision for the business. We wouldn’t have lasted a year if I had followed a “collector” mentality rather than a “business” mentality. International collectors seem to take this as an offense towards them rather than practicality. There is nothing further from the truth.
Best,
Tracy
