Who let the Apes out?Who, who, who, who, who? 🎵
I've a surface interest in this line. Some of them look really cool (like Kah-Lee and Thane), but not enough to dabble at that price.
I have Thane, gotta post some pics soon. i modded his arm armor thingy, made it more compact.
Spero Toys has opened up a storefront on Amazon, so for Prime members that means free shipping it looks like. Any penny we can save is a good thing. I only have the Pale figure from the first wave, but I'll be picking up more. Love the pose options offered by the articulation in these figures and quality construction. The character designs are awesome as well.
I got in on the first kickstarter. I deeply regret the kickstarter but I love the figures. I just wish I waited for the retail release.
The kickstarter was delayed significantly. I also assumed it was made to order like Mythic Legions so I overbought army builders and accessory packs. I’m not a flipper. I get FOMO. I’d hate it if I loved the line and the prices on eBay were triple. So I preordered $700 worth in the kickstarter.
As it turns out, not only do they overproduce by a significant margin compared to the preorder, but the retail final price is only a few dollars higher. Mythic Legions preorder price is like $30 and then retail price is $50. This line preorder is like $27 and retail price is $30.
Given I paid in full for 2 years in advance, I lost money on interest I could have earned. So I’m not happy about that, but the toys are amazing. They exceed expectations.
I will not be preordering anymore but once stuff is released I’ll likely buy new figures in the future.
I also am unlikely to preorder and prepay any figures from anyone going forward except Four Horseman. They’ve established they are made to order and retail price will be 30%+ higher. This is collector friendly because it means if you preorder something and don’t love it when it arrives 18 to 24 months later, you can sell on eBay and break even after fees and shipping.
I sold off half of my Cosmic Legions preorder and was able to break even after fees and shipping on the figures I didn’t love, because the retail price was 30% higher than I paid. There’s some Primal Figures I don’t love, but I’m stuck with them unless I want to lose 50% of what I prepaid 2 years ago and at that point, I might as well keep for custom fodder.
Overall amazing line, just don’t prepay for anything. He’s going to make tons of everything and saturate the market and you’ll have no problem buying at retail price, which is barely more expensive than preorder pricing.
FYI: the weapons from Madballs/Hornhead works perfect on General Thane, even the chicken leg works too.
I assume there’s still a fair few people waiting to get there messed up kickstarter figures sorted, after a few emails back and forth with them the last I heard was they’d worked out what was wrong with my stuff.
Notice: dont ever buy "expedited shipping" with Spero, they wont honor or it. i lost 20 bucks with them but i guess im a glutton for punishment cause here i am doing a thread about them 🙄
Notice: dont ever buy "expedited shipping" with Spero, they wont honor or it.
I have never found "expedited shipping" to be worth it. The only exception being if it is coming from overseas. The difference between 2-4 days via plane or 8-10 weeks via boat is substantial.
One point about expedited shipping. Even if you're able to pay for the expedited shipping, it helps to be aware if the retailer is in the middle of processing a ton of orders (like Spero and their Kickstarter orders) or a site's big sale (ie Hasbro). Don't be shocked your expedited order doesn't go out immediately during a period like this.
Like Red Ogre says, it's best to just avoid paying for expedited shipping from pretty much anyone. Especially smaller stores, which may only send out items once or twice a week. It usually takes anyone several days to even process an order and have it picked up by a shipper.
Regarding ordering via Kickstarter. I also ordered quite a bit. Turns out I could have waited on some of the army builders. But it's fine. I don't regret it. Yes, I didn't realize the figures would be so readily available afterward, but Spero has been around so I should have realized they'd make plenty of product. Good to know for future orders, but I don't regret my actions. Seems like a way to drive yourself crazy if you worry about other ways you could have used your preorder money.
I bought some figures during their Fourth of July sale… still haven’t shipped.
I ordered the white/purple wolf off Big Bad and an Orange PowerCon Tanger, got both of them already, they’re great
I had ordered the same figures I got during Spero’s sale at Big Bad, I let my pre-order stand in case Spero flaked out on me… those finally came into stock, still waiting on my Spero order.
site says “orders may take 5 days to ship”, it’s been two months. My shipping label was printed on July 6th, it’s August 28th and if I check the status it says “yeah it’s printed but we don’t have it yet” any emails asking for updates get an auto reply back saying they have backlog.
look, the figures are nice, I like the two I have and want the four I paid for but…
maybe don’t do a fourth of July sale if you can’t deliver the products before Labor Day (gonna laugh my ass off if they do a Labor Day sale)
maybe don’t send your ENTIRE team to PowerCon so shipping shuts down for a week if you’re so far behind you can’t get product out to people who paid for it before selling directly to costumers at a Con.
IDK, whatever, not mad just REALLY disappointed.
I bought some figures during their Fourth of July sale… still haven’t shipped.
…
maybe don’t do a fourth of July sale if you can’t deliver the products before Labor Day (gonna laugh my ass off if they do a Labor Day sale)
maybe don’t send your ENTIRE team to PowerCon so shipping shuts down for a week if you’re so far behind you can’t get product out to people who paid for it before selling directly to costumers at a Con.
Not a fan of their business practices. I don’t attribute it to malice. Just ignorance of how to run a business. Here’s a free tip if they read this:
When you’re sitting on a warehouse full of stuff people prepaid for over 2 years ago and the retail price is just a few dollars above the kickstarter price, where people not only paid in full up front but took a risk of getting nothing in return. Just to ultimately only save $3 per figure… in that event, you hire some temp workers, even if it’s $30 an hour to hire people for a few days and get ALL of the product out immediately. Rent trucks to take them to the UPS warehouse, don’t wait a week for UPS to show up.
It costs money, but they could have shipped it out to backers much sooner. They didn’t want to pay short-term help high wages to get them to work. I feel like that should have been baked into the price cake. Especially given the preorder price was basically retail. If preorder was 30% to 50% below retail like Four Horseman, then I could understand not having enough profit margin to hire a short-term crew. But we prepaid basically retail price in full so we should have gotten better shipping.
That said, the toys are really good and exceed expectations. Same quality as if Hasbro made them.
I ordered a bunch of these during the Kickstarter, all of which have been delivered. I placed a second order for some army builders from series 2 back in March. Series 2 arrived in June, I'm still waiting on that order. I've spoken to the staff and Jason himself a couple of times. Jason told me they would handle the missing figures and one exchange at Power Con but then a staff member told me they're holding on the army builders to be delivered after the con. We're at Sept 1 and I was told last night that my order "will very likely ship next week."
While I know they were a smaller company during the 1/18 side of thing, I was pretty impressed with Jason's level of customer service then. Now that they're bigger, things are a lot more frustrating. It's a shame too because it makes me not want to pre-order anything from them directly again when I can just buy these for retail at local stores (Toy Dept. in Cincinnati) or through BBTS when they're in stock.
The latest update on the kickstarter says they’re currently on list 7 of problem orders, which is great but what list am I on, list 8, list 9, list 43!
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