Jeremy Padawer of Jazwares, the person responsible for designing, creating and delivering AEW’s Unrivaled action figures, was recently a guest on the AEW Unrestricted podcast where he talked about the action figure industry, what is next for AEW’s action figure line and the secret of launching action figures.
Below are the highlights:
On the action figure industry: “When you make action figures, the key is authenticity, especially when you are reaching out to a collector. If you go to the action figure aisle, it’s a multi-billion dollar aisle, of which approximately 40% of the intended recipients are over the age of 13. So, they are not toys as much as they are collectibles depending on the brand.”
“When it comes to the presentation, you want people to be able to make a choice. Either they are going to have the opportunity to play with the figures or display them in the package. The objective is to never over ship a wave so that when people buy these things, they will have secondary market value later on.”
On what is next for AEW’s action figure line: “What we are going to do, because of the very significant early success that we are seeing at retail, it is very clear that we need to do things like 2 packs and tag teams and rivalries and bring the figures together in that way.”
On the secret of launching action figures: “This is what happens once you get past waves one and two. In a sense, it’s supply and demand by character. You can do that by looking at the, and I will never reveal who’s who, but by looking at the line-up and saying, ok, you have A-level main event. You have a B-level mid-card. You have C-level who still need to be celebrated because they could be A-level by the time you blink. Essentially what you do is you set it up where there is a certain amount of supply of each one of those figures in the master cartons you are shipping out. When you ship a box to retail, there are a certain number of figures that go in that box.
You can manage the supply of the A, B, and C level characters to make them all as exciting to the consumer by not overproducing B’s and C’s. At the end of the day, it allows you to have a much broader line-up. It allows eBay, later on, to be very excited about what’s going on across the entire line and it allows you to develop a broader sense of characters. If we put every main eventer out there with every wave, we would sell a lot of figures but people get bored with that over the course of time. You need to celebrate the entire roster and that’s what’s going to happen over time.”
