The Little World

I walk the kit aisle in the local hobby shop and wonder about the choices that have been made  – and I’m not sure about all three tiers of retail trade; manufacture,selling, and buying.

The maker of the plastic model kit needs to make a fair few of them with a profit upon each sale to be in business. The retailer needs to sell less, but he still needs profit. The buyer needs the least number – though some modellers have a stash that would suggest otherwise. But the strange thing is the impetus. Does it come from below or above? Let me explain.

The buyer has to buy. If something is not appealing enough to attract his attention the whole process never starts. If he is in a hi-fi store instead of he hobby shop and dropping his discretionary cash there, the hobby retailer and the maker are both out of business. So the plastic kit has to attract – either by the quality of moulding, the price, or the subject matter. The first two are fixed factors in the business…but the last one is the big variable. How does the maker find out what the buyer wants? DO they ask? DO they listen to answers? HOW does a buyer get his request to the maker?

I tried it once, during my large-scale model railway days. I met with the late president of Lehmann in Nürnberg and spent a day seeing the works and discussing prototypes. He was a great gentleman. I presented him with plans for Western Australian Government Railways locomotives in 1:22.5 scale that I’d had drawn up especially. He was courteous, but I’m afraid they never saw the light of day after that. In retrospect, even for the special-edition Lehmann trains, these locos would have been too esoteric. There would not have been buyers willing to engage for them.

Now in my plastic-kit days, I look out specific aircraft to add to my museum or air field. Fortunately most of these have been kitted at some stage of the game by a maker, and I always call in to any shop I see in the hopes of encountering one. But unfortunately I seem to encounter things that are on someone else’s list…and those lists can be either wild and weird or dull as dishwater. I do not need another P-47 or Spitfire, good as they might be.

Tell me – is there a conduit for buyers’ requests that can eventually be seen by the manufacturers? Or must we wait for them to sit bolt upright at 3:00 AM, struck with an inspiration?