Reply To: [unofficial weekender] Melting point

[blinky465 17028xp 0]

take ownership, syphon off assets, sell dead husk of warlord

Many years ago (mid-90s?) I went to apply for a job at Dapol, as the factory had just opened up in my (then) home town of Llangollen. I desperately needed the money (and quite fancied one of the girls who worked in the Dr Who shop). I was interviewed by the then-owner himself, David Boyle.

The man was a complete creep and I found him to be an arrogant berk. He seemed more interested in lording it over the plebs in a funny little Welsh village than any of my technical skills or requirements for the job. But he insisted that if I “went away and found out everything about his company Dapol” within a week, he’d give the job I desperately needed.

We were still using magazine-cover-CDs to connect Compuserve to various bulliten boards back then, there was no concept of “the internet” or “just Google it”. But I held him to his word (and spent days travelling to various libraries and went to their old office in Winsford – after all, I had a cheap railcard and not much else to do until the following week).

A week later, as I explained how his company got into serious financial difficulties, then mysteriously had a fire prior to its moving to the Winsford industrial estate, and a massive insurance payout, clearing its debts, he didn’t seem too impressed. When I pointed out that Dapol had agreed to sell many of its moulds to Hornby just prior to moving to Wales, then myseriously had a fire that destroyed much of its back catalogue and the moulds to remake them (and thus immediately increased its valuation of goods in stock as their scarcity sky-rocketed) it became clear to both of us that neither of us actually wanted me to work there.

The historical part of the company was subsequently bought up by Hornby. Strangely, many of the previously-believed destroyed moulds turned out to be perfectly useable, and very-much in-demand super-scarce products suddenly became available again.

So we have a company with a history of making products super-expensive through scarcity, selling to a company with a history of buying up scarce nostalgia-based products (Dapol sold a lot of Airfix moulds to Hornby that also mysteriously re-appeared) in order to create a cash-cow.

And now the company with the history of buying up nostalgia to drive up sales, and making things scarce to drive up profit, then regurgitating old products with licenced IP branding on to generate “real money” (Thomas the Tank and Harry Potter we big profit-generators in the early 2000s but were mostly just cheap stickers stuck onto existing product lines) which is currently wholly owned by an asset management company (PAM) has taken on yet more debt to acquire a 25% share (with  a mandatory buy-out clause after two years) in a company in a marketplace known for price gouging and artificial scarcity as a mechanism for driving up prices? (*cough, GW pre-orders cough*)

PAM were brutal in cutting more than half of Hornby’s product line, in a drive for profitability.
It doesn’t feel like this is particularly good news for “our” industry.