Good manufacturing-themed thread in YahooGroup NScaleKitbashing

[Blazeman]

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It's called "salesmanship" and customer service. People still sell products, or make people walk away "empty handed".

Nothing sells itself
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How true!. Friend of mine worked at a shop in SE Pa years ago. The shop had a large inventory of undec Athearn box cars. Owner was perplexed how to move them. My friend simply set up a display with the lid off the kit, and a bottle of paint appropriate for the car and a set of decals prominently displayed in the box. He did all the work for the modeler in gathering the supplies. They flew out the door.

So with a minimal effort, up went sales of paint and decals and excess inventory and working capital were reduced.

Perhaps your store did something similar to move the train sets. Extra track or cars, structures, whatever.

Sorry for the drift.

[lock4244]

So what type of money are we talking about to bring a decent shell, walkways, steps and a cab for a GP40-2W and/or GP40-2L to market (using the Atlas chassis)? I might be game if I could recoup my costs through sales or at least try to spearhead a push to get enough orders to make it worthwhile. Someone is already taking advance orders for one in N, but it's so poorly advertised that it may as well not exist.

[bbussey]

Mike, you're looking at a minimum of two separate multi-slide tools for the body, cab and walkway.  You probably could get away with a simple cavity tool regarding the cab glass and headlight light pipes, and borrow the existing fuel tank, horns and other details from existing Atlas parts.  Robb is more familiar with the complex tooling so he knows better than I.  For me, designing the model is easy while designing the tools to make it is more difficult.  The cost depends on how much you do up front.  If you can supply the fully-designed model in digital form, you save a good amount; if you design the tool itself, you save even more.  If you sub-contract out the whole job, you're probably well into five figures.

[sirenwerks]

Market research and statistics are not perfect. A great example was brought up today at work. HobbyTown is working on a national database of sales of all their stores so one store can look at what sells at other stores and decide if it would work for them. There was one trainset that we were trying to decide if we should restock today. Looking at national stats, total sales of this set for all the HobbyTowns in the US was 12 in the past year. Not exactly setting the world on fire. But when you look closely at the stats, our shop sold 9 of those 12. That blows the idea of following the pattern of the rest of the nation right out of the water. In so many cases, there is no rhyme or reason to why one thing sells and another doesn't.

That sample size (12) is too small to make a proficient statistical analysis. But you are right about regional differences in sales; especially when you consider if individual stores have control over  product placement, market-oriented pricing, and, yes, as Blazeman notes, knowledgeable salesmanship.

Those factors make it even more difficult to make a statistical analysis. But those factors aren't part of making a pre-product development study, as I was speaking of. It's apples and oranges.

That being said, you can't make the comparison you have and claim it as an informed trend. A larger sample size and a sales history greater than a year would provide real data for statistical analysis. It would be even a better comparison if HobbyTown would get similar sales information from competitors, to compare to its efforts.

[lock4244]

Mike, you're looking at a minimum of two separate multi-slide tools for the body, cab and walkway.  You probably could get away with a simple cavity tool regarding the cab glass and headlight light pipes, and borrow the existing fuel tank, horns and other details from existing Atlas parts.  Robb is more familiar with the complex tooling so he knows better than I.  For me, designing the model is easy while designing the tools to make it is more difficult.  The cost depends on how much you do up front.  If you can supply the fully-designed model in digital form, you save a good amount; if you design the tool itself, you save even more.  If you sub-contract out the whole job, you're probably well into five figures.

I suppose I'll be saving my pennies then.