That's what I told Alex. *heh* I suggested a work-from-home customer-service job where they pay me in product to distill the actual internal information they can't release into some sort of non-disclosing update for customers and potential customers. We'll see.
Yeah, I would
never recommend ANOVOS -- even the in-stock stuff -- fo rpeople who just want to dress up once for something casual. That's what Rubies is for. I know some people in the 501st spend a lot of time, money, and effort on really
good costumes, then turn around and sell them after they've worn them once or twice and start working on the next. It's a mentality I just
can't wrap my head around. So if that's what they're after, I'd probably have too hard a time not throttling them on general principle, independent of vendors. :lol
As @
cboath put it, they have too little control over all the manufacturing steps. When they get production time at any given factory, whether the boat will be held in port for some reason, whether their shipping container will miss it and have to wait for the next one, whether their shipping container falls overboard and needs to be replaced (this happened back in the '90s with Games Workshop -- the very first shipment of Eldar Falcon grav-tank model kits was one of the shipping containers that fell off the cargo ship on its way to the US)... The issue with the Phasma helmets was that, for that batch, someone at the factory who didn't know any better released them for shipment too soon, so they were boxed up and sent to the boat where they sat. Because of all the complaints and demands for refunds, ANOVOS just decided to cut their losses and stop offering the Phasma helmet. That... doesn't feel like a huge win for the customers to me...
ANOVOS doesn't have the manpower to have people at all the factories they contract with in China to make sure they do it right. LFL and Disney don't care enough to hire their own people to oversee QC at all their licensees' factories. Maybe Disney just needs to buy a few factories over there and streamline things.
Some portion of those unforeseen delays are when they get a test item from China and it's wrong, and they have to have it reworked and put back in the queue to try again. If they were doing it all in-house, a lot of that lag would be cut down (though not eliminated). As it is, they have to get across what they need,
and the people doing the work have to "get it". There's a language barrier and also a not-insignificant "don't-give-a-s***" barrier.
My most personal example is the FOTK armor kit. ANOVOS have the digital files used to make the prototypes for the film costumes. The film costumes were made of a semi-flexible, very forgiving urethane resin, cast in negative molds in all the complex shapes required -- especially the upper-back piece that has complex indents and extends over the shoulders to curve under the arms in front. Impossible to vacu-form. The "Alpha" and "Beta" kits some of the 501st got for the TFA premiere were decidedly rough drafts, with inaccurate detailing and some massaging of piece-fit needed. Translating single-piece negative molds to multi-piece positive bucks is migraine-inducing. Calculating how much to take off for material thickness, trying to keep detailing as sharp as possible, etc. Especially figuring out how to do impossible pieces like that upper-body piece.
It wasn't until they got the first test pulls of the newly-revised "Gamma"/production version that they realized the factory who had beein doing the work hadn't taken pains to make sure the piece edges lined up right, and the thickness of the plastic they went with lost too much detail. So, late in the pre-production, they had to choose between releasing a woefully inferior product on time that they'd get all kinds of negative feedback on... or essentially start over from the digital files and tool new bucks for better fit and sharper detail. I applaud the choice they made. Could they have done it that way from the start? Yes -- for a substantially higher initial cost (milling steel bucks is a lot more expensive than carving wooden ones or casting hydrocal ones). I can't blame them for hoping the cheaper option they led with would work. Hopefully these will be popular items when finished and shipping, to warrant multiple batches. That'll be the only way they can avoid taking a big loss on this item. The good news is that the steel bucks will stand up to many thousands of pulls without any loss of detail, so they have a chance to make it back.
All of that involved, often, literal months of back-and-forth time between each step. Their current shipping estimate is in hopes that the actual pieces that should be here by now don't run into any delays or downchecks from LFL or Disney, which ANOVOS have no control over. If it's delayed again, I'll be annoyed, yes. But it's tempered by my knowing they're not doing it on purpose, or to shine us on, and that they're at least as annoyed by every new delay as we are. Each one they know hurts their reputation and potential sales. I'm hoping to try to help them find a happy medium between their preferred transparency and the utterly-opaque opposite extreme they've gone to since Disney told them to stop being so open. Disney didn't spell out what to reveal or what not to, so they're playing it safe by not saying anything. That obviously doesn't work for anyone involved (except Disney, and, arguably, not even them).
--Jonah
