At the end of July, amidst all the doom and gloom about the Club Infinite Earths and Club Eternia subscription minimums, I wrote an editorial about why Mattel should bite the bullet and institute pre-orders instead of subscriptions. Now, just a little over a month later, the worst scenario possible has happened – both subscriptions squeaked by, while the Young Justice “pre-order” missed the threshold by a wide margin – it was under half the minimum at the time the pre-order was set to close, despite Mattel doubling the amount of time the window to order was open. I don’t have to explain to Young Justice collectors why this sucks for them, but indulge me while I explain why this sucks for anyone interested in any of the collector-oriented lines sold through MattyCollector.com.
The worst part of this turn of events is that it reinforces the flawed notion that the only sales approach that works on Matty is the all-in subscription, because pre-orders don’t. Why is it flawed? For one, it’s a reasonable conclusion that a lot of collectors strongly dislike the all-in model. Both times the DC all-in sub has been offered, there were just barely enough subscribers to hit the minimums – shocking for the successor to the line that lasted 20 waves at big box retailers. For He-Man and Masters of the Universe Classics, enough folks were turned off by the first all-in sub that Mattel had to pull out the stops to hit a minimum we didn’t even know existed until this time around.
Furthermore, the notion is flawed because Mattel hasn’t truly tried pre-orders with collectors yet. Since they put the thermometer on the Young Justice 2-pack, what they really offered collectors was an all-in subscription for those two figures. To me, a real pre-order is a lot simpler – it’s got the product, the price, and the date the product will ship. Most importantly, with a real pre-order, the manufacturer has already committed to making the product – it’s not conditional. This is not some kind of crazy new business idea – a lot of companies operate on a pre-order system. Even what Mattel does with its retail lines are considered pre-orders, just with bigger customers instead of individual collectors.
One of the ugly conclusions you might draw from Mattel going down this one way path to all-in subs for collectors is that they just don’t have faith in their own products anymore. If they did, do you think they’d require minimum guaranteed sales for the whole year, just so they could green light the toys for that year?
When you attend any fan panel at the conventions, someone will inevitably ask a question about the future of their favorite toy line – and the stock answer (not just from Mattel) is, “As long as you keep buying them, we’ll keep making them!” It’s an elegant answer, because it tells us as fans that we are the ones responsible for the life and death of the objects of our fanaticism. It compels us to buy! Unfortunately, the fans of Matty’s toy lines have been treated to the downfall of the all -in subs – as long as we keep buying (the all-in subs), Mattel will keep making (whatever they want to).
The unfortunate truth is that there’s a flip side to that statement that the marketers at Mattel have forgotten, or worse, are just ignoring – they too bear the responsibility to make the product as compelling as possible. Because as long as Mattel had kept making toys that were worthwhile to buy, collectors would have kept buying them.