Met a new VX friend... who is in the market to buy

[Anita]

I suppose I could ask him what are the options open to us. But I think that a minimum order for them is going to be in the thousands.

[SGT.BATGUANO]

Since he opened the door, by all means ask. If he knows there's only 4500 VX's out there, hopefully he can get a shorter run produced. Then all the members could buy 10 or whatever each, and sell a few to HW collectors as this might be the smalllest run ever produced.

Other colors might be gold or pearl white.

[technocoy]

thats awesome! you should ask him if he has any advice for me and my pals, we are trying to start and independent designer toy company! thats so neat that you met someone who works for a major toy company! it would probably (if you are lucky) be a minumum order of like a thousand. they could however (if they still have the old ones) do it cheaper by just doing a different paint mask on the old ones. we could get custom ones that way for probably not too much dough. it's usually x amount for the manufacture and then increments of say a grand-5grand for different paint schemes.

take care,
technocoy

[Raque Thomas]

I did a custom run with Racing Champions in the past, and the minimum (after extended negotiations!) was 15,000 pieces. I suspect that HW woud be much higher. However, it appears that the original has sold well enough to justify doing a second run with the white wheels and white cladding; so it could be assumed that they could make a go of it with a third run if it didn't involve a total re-tooling. The cladding is plastic (and hence cheaper to re-tool), so maybe they could make the wheel opennings larger and put larger wheels on it, as well as make it a different color & put in the tinted windows that were used on the silver version. Black (I may be biased!) with tinted windows and larger wheels would look good - or maybe an orange Geolander.

What it will probably take is an advocate to push this, as there is no way to approach it from the "guaranteed order" aspect. If your guy could look at the sales numbers and justify another version internally based on that - we may have a shot. Maybe touting the collector status of the vehicle and the replicas could help as well. I think one of their larger (think they are called Muscle Machines??) versions tricked out would be VERY cool, and very sellable!

[Anita]

The minimum order with them would be 5,000.

[SGT.BATGUANO]

What would be the cost per unit?

[Anita]

Mike, I will have to get him a call and get some more details. I'll do my best to find out what the options are.