>>11157418Todd clearly prefers statues now and has for quite awhile. The market rejected him once his statues had to decline in quality due to the Chinese labor cost increases and paint app cost skyrocketing though, as well as his potential shops drying up to places like LCS, FYE, Hot Topic and Suncoasts.
At that point it seems like he didn't think he could raise prices commensurate to the costs the Chinese factories were demanding of him to keep the quality constant--and maybe he couldn't because it would be too drastic a swing for customers to handle. So he had to downgrade his offerings to keep the price reasonable and even drop making stuff in some cases.
Issue is, poor collectors don't have the room to display statues that can't even move or offer them any entertainment value like toys can. Statues provide a lot less value. So once the statues didn't look worth displaying, poorer collectors simply didn't buy them.
Rich collectors bought high quality statues like x-plus or prime 1 studio and won't touch modern Mcfarlane statues for the most part.
I only would've liked to have paid more attention to this playing out in the late 00s and 2010s to know what McFarlane might have been able to do to avert it--just for interest's sake. I don't know if he could've pivoted and become like an x-plus or prime 1 studios. His statues were very good in the early 00s, very impressive for their price. But maybe he also lost a lot of his talent and thus couldn't continue at that level.
