Rolling for Initiative is a weekly column by Scott Thorne, PhD, owner of Castle Perilous Games & Books in Carbondale, Illinois and instructor in marketing at Southeast Missouri State University. This week, Thorne discusses a recent email sent out to retailers from Wizards of the Coast as well as an update on Archon’s plans for preorders on StarCraft: The Miniatures Game.
Wizards of the Coast caused quite a bit of concern and confusion this past week with the email the company sent out regarding allocations of Secrets of Strixhaven Collector Booster boxes. This was the first of these emails WotC has sent out and its purpose was to confirm to WPN stores they would receive a minimum number of Secrets of Strixhaven Collector Booster boxes and that if a store wanted more, it should contact its distributor.
However, many stores read the email as indicating the set would be allocated and the number in the email was how many booster displays they would receive. I read one comment from a retailer indicating they had a figurative heart attack when they thought WotC had allocated the quantity of booster displays down from their initial order of 75 down to 1. While the intent of the email was appreciated, the way it was worded caused a lot of unneeded concern and sending it out did not accomplish anything beneficial since stores had already received confirmation from their chosen distributors regarding their preordered quantities of Secrets of Strixhaven a week or two before.
If WotC plans to keep sending out these out, the company needs to clarify these are guaranteed minimums, not allocated. To retailers, getting a notice a product is “allocated” means the publisher or manufacturer did not produce enough to meet the quantities pre-ordered and will have to cut quantities preordered simply due to not having enough of the product.
This typically happens with hot TCG products such as Pokemon, One Piece and Riftbound, where there is far more demand than current supply can meet. I know at least one distributor which has given up even the pretense of meeting pre-ordered demand for Pokemon, telling the stores it supplies to not even bother putting in pre-orders for new Pokemon product as the distributor will allocate what it has available and the store can indicate if it wants that quantity. If a store does not, there are certainly plenty of other stores happy to take their allocation.
Following up from last week’s column on the number of miniatures lines releasing this year (see “Straining Budgets“), I received an email from Daryl McKay, head of NA Business Development for Archon Studio, producers of the upcoming StarCraft: The Miniatures Game. McKay wanted to make sure retailers know Archon wants to partner with them to make sure the StarCraft line is profitable for both the studio and the store (see “‘Preorder Plan” for details).
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The opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editorial staff of ICv2.com.
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