from Hacker News

Funko Pop became a $686M business

by jatsign on 8/13/19, 11:50 AM with 52 comments

• by onion2k on 8/16/19, 7:13 AM

  When I see the success of companies like Funko Pop I can't help but remember Simon (Spaced, Shaun of the Dead, Star Wars, etc) Pegg's excellent essay[1] on the infantilization of adults by modern culture, turning us all in to passive consumers who want a magical superhero to turn up and save the day instead of doing something ourselves.

  "We are made passionate about the things that occupied us as children as a means of drawing our attentions away from the things we really should be invested in, inequality, corruption, economic injustice etc. It makes sense that when faced with the awfulness of the world, the harsh realities that surround us, our instinct is to seek comfort, and where else were the majority of us most comfortable than our youth?"

  The fact that actual grown ups want to spend money on plastic caricatures of their favourite movie characters is fine in itself, but only if we also take responsibility of the state of the society we live in.

  [1] http://simonpegg.net/2015/05/19/big-mouth-strikes-again/

• by fiblye on 8/16/19, 6:37 AM

  >CEO Brian Mariotti called his company “recession proof.”

  Famous last words. When another major recession hits, one of the first costs to be cut is plastic junk. These are just beanie babies with more Disney branded characters. People will get sick of cluttering their house with dozens of the same item with mild variations at some point, until the next “gotta catch em all” toy comes out.

• by ebg13 on 8/16/19, 2:59 PM

  I get why people like figurines, but I don't understand how much love funkopop specifically gets. Their model quality is just so poor. No detail. No character expression. No differentiation between characters. They feel like just the absolute lowest effort throwaways. There are so many great toy modelers out there, and yet somehow the cheapest least effort one is the one that people know about because it's the one that, for some terrible reason, gets brand licensing deals.

  edit: Just to add more...I mean...someone else linked this figure https://media.entertainmentearth.com/assets/images/e9792a6af... Every single funkopop figure looks exactly like that with only slightly more than a palette and hair swap. Compare that to the same series models from Banpresto: http://www.banpresto.jp/prize/0008.html

• by jacksproit on 8/16/19, 12:24 PM

  Based on how the prices have been falling recently this seems like a puff piece to try and prevent a full bubble pop. I wouldn't be sad to see them go. There are a lot of sketchy scams around "mystery box" sales that are essentially unlicensed unregulated lotteries. I suspect that some YouTube personalities are complicit in the scams. The language used on many pop sites is masterfully devious https://popcollectorsalliance.com/resources/whats-a-grail-wh...

• by tehwebguy on 8/16/19, 6:26 AM

  Very impressive, but it’s a shame to me that the vinyl figure company to lock down every IP imaginable has such horrible, dead eyes.

• by fouc on 8/16/19, 6:40 AM

  Seems like a market that is inflated by collectors that are hoping it will be worth more in the future. Could end up being another trading cards fiasco.

• by tiborsaas on 8/16/19, 8:33 AM

  “OUR BRAND IDENTITY IS TO BE ABLE TO SAY THAT WE HAVE SOMETHING FOR LITERALLY EVERYBODY”

  Hmm, it's the thing everybody would advise against with a passion.

  - Who's your target customer?

  - Everybody.

  - Well good luck with that (snarky smily)

  Good to see counter examples.

• by mkane848 on 8/16/19, 1:20 PM

  Maybe for now, but everyone I know in my age group that was super into these (23-28) is currently trying to sell them because they have too many and the novelty wore off.

  Feels basically like a Beanie Baby craze, except this time, the people who are into actual quality or give off the hobbyist vibe go to other products like Nendoroid.

• by jatsign on 8/16/19, 11:31 AM

  How strange. I posted this 2 days ago and it didn't make it to the front page, but not for some reason it says I only posted it 6 hours ago?

• by avian on 8/16/19, 7:11 AM

  Does anyone know how plastic figurines like that are cast? I've been recently looking at some similar toys and they have many concave features and small details that seem impossible to make with simple injection moulding (as in, you wouldn't be able to remove them from the mould)

• by silveira on 8/16/19, 3:01 PM

  Here is an interesting video essay of the business of Funko Pop https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TJ513v8Pquw and looking the numbers, their future is very uncertain to say the least.

• by slang800 on 8/16/19, 3:16 PM

  Whoever came up with the idea of re-marketing children's toys to adults was a genius. It combines the passive consumerism of kids with the expendable income of adults in a way that simply wouldn't have been tolerated more than a few decades ago.

• by ptah on 8/16/19, 9:00 AM

  the documentary on netflix is pretty interesting