#NoBlister-NoBusiness
Collectors around the world are outraged about a comment made during a livestream from a major toy manufacturer that plastic blisters/windows in packaging will be gone in 2023. While most collectors were under the impression that collector geared product would have been excempt. This no longer seems to be true. After a long slump things moved into the right direction, business was picking up, product was never better before. Now this. What seems to be the problem you ask? It is just plastic!
No, it is not. This is about the most iconic packaging and the most iconic brand, and not just that. This is about knowing who your customers are. This is about knowing how collectors and kids are triggered. Nobody gets excited looking at a piece of cardboard. Cardboard boxes work for cereals, not action figures. Fans collect these actionfigures, the Vintage Collection line for what it is - an iconic packaging that is in line with a product that first was marketed in the 1970’s and took retail by storm.
Who are your customers and what is on their mind? Are they all polluting the environment? How many of those blisters make it ashore on a beach in Spain? Florida? Well these people in the picture you might want to cater to are not your customers, and never will be. Their endgame, and everybody can look this up is destroying capitalism as a whole.
Most collectors nowadays keep their toys carded or boxed and very rarely throw away the packaging. If they do most countries have recycling in place. So where is the harm? Those collectors that do open the packaging also keep the packaging to display or just to keep. A lot of collectors do not only buy just one figure. They collect variations in figures, paintjobs, country variations, by datestamp or whatever floats their boat. So where is the incentive for those to still buy multiples of one figure if all we get is a cardboard box where one can’t see the variation, the posing of the figure, if the paintjob is not messed up? How are we supposed to check this? Are we now forced to open all boxes? If we don’t how would we know if someone bought the item, returned it to a store and switched out a figure or put a stone into the returned box? It’s not happening? Oh, yes it is. So why would someone still want to collect who never opens his or hers toys if they now have to open or hope whatever shows on the outside of the box is really inside!?
Here is already an example why this won’t work. In general I’m a non-opener, but off and on open some for different reasons. From 9 of the same figure the first one opened came with two left hands, a missing flame effect, black paint from the visor applied into the red of the helmet. So one figure in a box with 3 flaws! Would it have come carded the figure would have stayed on the card, be added to the error collection and cherished, not being opened, not creating waste!
Now let’s take a closer look at the packaging. The accessories can be found in little white paperbags that are taped to the cardboard. The tape destroyed the little bags, creating waste. So is the tape, waste and glue. Glue is a chemical. Adhesive tapes consist of a material called a backing or carrier (paper, plastic -OH PLASTIC? -film, cloth, foam, foil, etc.), which is coated with an adhesive and a release liner if needed. Pressure-sensitive adhesive (PSA, self-adhesive, self-stick adhesive) is a type of nonreactive adhesive which forms a bond when pressure is applied to bond the adhesive with a surface. PSAs are usually based on an elastomer compounded with a suitable tackifier (e.g., a rosin ester). The elastomers can be based on acrylics, which can have sufficient tack on their own and do not require a tackifier.; bio-based acrylate — recently, a biological-based macromonomer was grafted onto a backbone of acrylate so that the resulting PSA uses 60% bio-based materials,[4] butyl rubber, ethylene-vinyl acetate (EVA) with high vinyl acetate content; can be formulated as a hot-melt PSA, natural rubber, nitriles, silicone rubbers, requiring special tackifiers based on “MQ” silicate resins, composed of a monofunctional trimethylsilane (“M”) reacted with quadrafunctional silicon tetrachloride (“Q”).
So, how is this better? The plastic tape evolved to trash now. Nobody keeps used plastic tape in his or hers collection. While the blister trays even on opened figures could still be used to store figures and accessories so they won’t get lost. In order to now store these figures and accessories we just buy little plastic bags now to store them in, right? Or toss them back into the cardboard box they came in.
Below is another example.
In the photo you can see 64 Vintage Collection Boba Fetts, unopened on cardback. This is an old photo and more were added over time. Tell me Big H. why would I or anyone else would still want to buy that many of a single figure if we can’t enjoy the paintjob, errors, country variations, when all is now hidden in a cardboard box? Exactly, there is no reason to do this anymore. Every toy manufacturer that will do this to their lines WILL HURT their sales. No doubt about it.
If you mess with this line it will impact collectors and your business. If you want to reduce plastic in general throw away toys like waterpistols and what not, sure, no problem, no second thought on that. But you should never change a winning team and most certainly not mess with such an iconic packaging.
Besides, what is the other important point why we use plastic packaging? Correct, to keep things clean, possibly sterilized in some areas. While cardboard can pull moisture and build mold, you won’t have that problem with a blister packaging. You don’t want bacteria enter a cardboard box and have your child lick on the toy, don’t you?! Imagine all the toys in a store aisle without that protection. How is the store to keep things clean?
To even talk about this and cause a stir in the collecting community during these times with a world closing in on WWIII it is a mood point to hope this will help the world. It won’t change a thing.
Volker C., StarWars-Figuren.com
Star Wars and the Star Wars logo are registered trademark and/or copyright Lucasfilm, Ltd. © Disney used under Fair use. No copyright infringement is intended.
#Disney #Hasbro #StarWars
And some borrowed thoughts from the late George Carlin:
“We’re so self-important. Everybody’s going to save something now. “Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save those snails.” And the greatest arrogance of all: save the planet. Save the planet, we don’t even know how to take care of ourselves yet. I’m tired of this s**t. I’m tired of f-ing Earth Day. I’m tired of these self-righteous environmentalists. People trying to make the world safe for Volvos. Besides, environmentalists don’t give a s**t about the planet. Not in the abstract they don’t. You know what they’re interested in? A clean place to live. Their own habitat. They’re worried that some day in the future they might be personally inconvenienced. Narrow, unenlightened self-interest doesn’t impress me.
The planet has been through a lot worse than us. Been through earthquakes, volcanoes, plate tectonics, continental drift, solar flares, sun spots, magnetic storms, the magnetic reversal of the poles … hundreds of thousands of years of bombardment by comets and asteroids and meteors, worldwide floods, tidal waves, worldwide fires, erosion, cosmic rays, recurring ice ages … And we think some plastic bags and some aluminum cans are going to make a difference? The planet isn’t going anywhere. WE are!
We’re going away. Pack your s**t, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam … The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas.
The planet will be here for a long, long, LONG time after we’re gone, and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, ’cause that’s what it does. It’s a self-correcting system. The air and the water will recover, the earth will be renewed. And if it’s true that plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn’t share our prejudice toward plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn’t know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, “Why are we here?”
George Carlin
