10mm plastic miniatures

[hellhammer09]

Hi guys,
   I have a question for you all.
Seeing lots of manufacturers sites I notice that no one produce 10mm plastic miniatures. Only GW produced some strips for warmaster some years ago.
So I want to ask you why??

Is the process more expensive?? Or there is not enough volume orders? Or again, are 10mm miniatures too small for plastic process??
I see that in 28mm plastic miniatures nowadays have lots more details that metal ones so I don't see why not to produce with this material.
I address my question also to Pendraken team, if you do not get bored 

Thank you all guys!!!

[Fenton]

Not sure if this helps but I believe the development and tooling costs for a plastic set would be about 3-5000 GBP

[Zippee]

Tooling costs against market return are probably prohibitive.

GW ditched their plastic 6mm Space Marines and 10mm Warhammer - not sure what that tells us about viability other than that small scales are possible 

Even in 28mm only thebig sellers (and favoured sons) get the plastic treatment -  it's virtually all Napoleonic and WWII  with the odd bit of ECW and Ancient. Even here ther's nothing you could complete an army with.

In 15mm it's only WWII

20mm of course is very well served but that does seem to be a total role reversal, plastic domination with a few metals struggling along.

So how many 10mm French fusiliers must one sell to recoup the tooling cost?  And don't even think about asking for variants 

Because what we really want sre 1809 Wurttembergers and Hessians 

[FierceKitty]

Because what we really want sre 1809 Wurttembergers and Hessians. 

Oh, no it isn't!

[Leman]

Oh yes it is. It's behind you!  Oh yawn, it's another bloody tank.

[Ithoriel]

Oh yes it is. It's behind you!  Oh yawn, it's another bloody tank.

Damn, meant to ask about the Ratte at Falkirk yesterday and forgot all about it.

My memory isn't what .... what was I saying?

[fred.]

I think its simple economics -

10mm is niche and the sales volumes are low, you will never sell that many figures. Current production methods work well, as there isn't that much metal in a 10mm figure, and even a 10mm tank is quite hollow, so doesn't use loads of metal. Also setup costs are low, I think Leon has mention £50 for a mould. I assume spinning the moulds is quite quick as the figures are small, so there is little volume to fill, and they will cool quickly.

Plastic setup costs are high (£1000s to £10,000s) - unit costs are much lower, to make money with this you have to sell loads.

To me, one of the big advantages of 28mm plastics is that figures can be posed and converted easily due to separate arms and accessories - I really wouldn't want that in 10mm!!

There have (are?) been a few ranges of 10/12mm tanks - these have generally been very nice, and at an economical price.

I don't think GW stopped producing 10mm plastics because of any inherent issue with them, it was more that they want to focus on their core 2 product ranges.

[Leon]

It's simply down to the costs and potential sales, as those above have said.

We were speaking with another manufacturer several years ago who was considering going into 28mm plastics.  For tooling a box set of 5 sprues, plus an opening stock, he was looking at close to £50,000.  On top of that, you have to produce '3-up' sculpts for the tooling process, so basically 90mm masters, which could be anywhere from £300-£1000 each I'd imagine.  If you sell the volume, then it can be very profitable in the longer term.  The opening stock that you received was either 10,000 or 20,000 boxes, so at £15 per box you were clearing either £150k or £300k return.  Re-stocks after the initial run are very cheap as well, less than £2 per box.

There are cheaper tooling options these days, around the £8,000-£10,000 mark I've heard, and those are being used by many of the newer plastics companies, or smaller sprue boxsets like 15mm tanks, etc. 

10mm plastics unfortunately wouldn't have the sales potential to make them viable.  And you'd also need a lot more sculpts doing which would bump the investment up quickly.  In 28mm, you can get away with 4 or 5 bodies and a load of separate arms/heads, so the customer can create the variation themselves.  With 10mm figures, nobody wants to be glueing arms onto every figure, so you've got to have them all sculpted differently.  A boxset of 50 figures would potentially need 50 sculpts doing, again at the '3-up' size and price, so £100 each or £5000 for the lot.  People would also expect to pay less for plastic figures, so your box of 50 figures would have to be priced at only £5-£6 and you've then got to shift 3000 of them before you've covered your initial investment.  I'm pretty sure we've not sold 3000 of any single code in our catalogue!

There are of course other factors, such as using 3D sculpts instead of traditional, which could cut out a lot of the design costs.  You can also transfer production to China, which might being the costs down but can make things harder to control and could compromise quality. 

Tanks could be an option, but people like Takara and the World Tank Museum pre-paints have gone down that route previously and didn't find it viable, so you'd need to look at how you would make it work when they couldn't.

It's something we keep an eye on, the same as 3D sculpting, but it's a long way from being viable business-wise.

[toxicpixie]

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/6mm-scale-armies-wave-2

These guys have done a couple of successful indiegogo's for 6mm plastics but I gather it's been hard work - not so much the funding side or the design side, as manufacturing assurances that were a tad optimistic. Still, like the Mongols, it might be a good way forward - essentially you cover the design & set up costs up front, and everything after that is gravy. In theory, anyway...

Like Leon says though, you'd have to pic something high volume and popular, that people will buy repeatedly. WW2 "starter" or Company sets maybe?

[Hussargeneral]

"Because what we really want sre 1809 Wurttembergers and Hessians  Cool"

And Baden line and Horse!! Oh! and Saxons   

[FierceKitty]

"Because what we really want sre 1809 Wurttembergers and Hessians  Cool"

And Baden line and Horse!! Oh! and Saxons   

What is missing from this list?

[Ithoriel]

What is missing from this list?

A German WW2 Goliath ... and maybe an Aufklarungs Panzer 38(t) ... and a schwimmwagen ... and a Soviet 203 mm howitzer M1931 (B-4) and a 152 mm howitzer-gun M1937 (ML-20).

Can't think of anything else at the moment

[FierceKitty]

Sorry, did you say something?

[fsn]

Neapolitans.

[Lord Kermit of Birkenhead]

FSN - why would we want an ice cream......


IanS