Don't confuse my saying there's some blame all around with absolution for anybody. I definitely don't blame anyone who's still in this thread -- we've hung on longer than many. Even those who have cancelled and been (finally) refunded still have an interest in seeing what happens and hoping with some faint glimmer that it's not the crash and burn that seems likely.But Inquisitor - don’t you at all have a problem with the idea that your assessment opens up an avenue of sympathy for these two jokers?
Yikes. I had zero investment in the Kylo stuff, so I never dug into it.There are overwhelming examples of delusion and deceit. Myself, I have it on good authority that their Kylo costumes were never even started. That whole write up about them being finished but then all being trashed is also suspiciously missing from their site.
There's a part of me that's wondered if the "revised" First Order Stormtrooper stuff was a separate thing to supply Dinsey's parks, and some leftover kits were sent ot customers. I know they did start the TFA armor and helmets (and, indeed, sent out many of the helmets) before things went weird... But I wouldn't be shocked to discover the TFA armor project is still languishing somewhere and the TLJ stuff was a whole different thing.
I think they did, at first. Something happened partway in. And I doubt we'll ever know beyond the vague "the owners got in over their heads and bulled forward rather than pause and reassess".These guys dont have what it takes and, in fooling Disney, fooled themselves into thinking they did.
What I have is that, across eight or ten preorders, multiple thousands of preorders each, that then, after preordering was closed and actual work was committed to, multiple hundreds in each of those started cancelling. Not all at once, but someone posting about it on social media tends to get others to go "Hey, yeah, it's been two months and they haven't shipped me my thing...*" and cancel theirs, too.And any cancellations a week or so after purchase were not numerous enough nor frequent enough to affect a company with any real sense of structure. They had more than enough customers to wait through their Q1-Q4 system if they adhered to it.
*"...that I totally didn't read the bit on the picture saying that was only a representation, or the part in the listing that said production would commence after pre-orders were closed and it would take a year or so to be ready to ship..."
Basic math, even without exact figures, yields tens to hundreds of thousands of invested dollars that suddenly weren't there any more.
You are right. They couldn't handle something like this. It was a foray into a type of product they hadn't made before, on a scale they hadn't had to meet before, for a more impatient customer base than they were used to dealing with, and a licensor who demanded a fee much bigger than they'd had to account for before. Their business model that had served them perfectly well up to that point broke its hip and fell on its face and they had no idea how to react.