Hobby Master’s 1:72 US Navy McDonnell F-4J Phantom II Fighter-Bomber – VF-84 “Fighting 84”, USS Franklin D. Roosevelt (CV-42), Vietnam, 1972
We’re a scant day into the new year and we’re already behind the eight ball. Three major shipments – Dragon, Corgi and Hobby Master – are upon us, each requiring a fair bit of attention to review, break down and ship out to everyone that had placed pre-orders for them way back in 2018. So, we’re going to ask that everyone remain patient while we get these orders processed and out into the shipping channel as quickly as possible. Please do not contact us asking about when you will receive your shipment since it takes us away from the order fulfillment process.
We’re just a handful of days away from saying farewell to 2018 so we thought it a good time to look back at the past twelve months as well as gaze ahead at the coming year.
For starters, we’ve moved the current shipment of Corgi and Dragon Armor products from our Product in Transit section to the New Arrivals area so that we can close out the books at our end and get ready for our end-of-year inventory. These last two shipments are still scheduled to arrive during the first week of January barring any unforeseen shipping issues brought on by the holidays and/or the weather, so we appreciate your patience should you look forward to receiving them sooner rather than later.
2019 is stacking up to be quite a year for us. In the first quarter, we plan to spin up our new Walmart and Jet.com marketplace stores, bringing our marketplace tally to five (Ebay, Amazon and Facebook being the others) in addition to our main site. There are some other irons in the fire, so-to-speak, which will require a bit of fine tuning on our part to get them completely aligned with our present marketing strategy. More on that later.
We don’t foresee any issues with the current crop of product lines we stock — in fact, as Forces of Valor finally comes on line in a meaningful way, we anticipate things will get hectic early on without the added pressure of the holiday season bearing down on us. Again, this all depends upon Waltersons, the new caretakers of the brand, sticking to and maintaining a reliable release schedule all the while expanding their product portfolio to cover all of its previous ranges as well as those still expected to be bolted on.
Naturally, there are the old stalwarts to consider too, which include Hobby Master, Corgi, Eaglemoss and a few other longtime brands, who continue to improve and expand upon their own core ranges and synergies to round out our selection and those of our customers. Several manufacturers have made quite a name for themselves and will likely continue to carve out respectable niches in the marketplace that few can ignore.
We will have more to say about 2019 shortly, which could include a relocation for us should we decide to move forward with the change. As always, we wish all of our patrons a happy and healthy new year and continue to say thank you for your patronage as we embark upon our nineteenth year of operation.
