That last thread got locked down before I could comment on this: If designers are not familiar with the limitations of pad printing and painting technologies, you would think that KR would educate them or set limits or guidelines for them. If you have have no QC problems over literally hundreds of different releases, why doesn't KR take your knowledge and experience and use it to create guidelines for other designers? It's not like KR just started making toys. You would think that they would refine the process and reduce the chance of complexity and failures. And I'm not saying that Japanese toy companies don't have some QC problems as well, especially with new paints or the chrome stuff.
I was wondering the same thing. I'm presuming because it seemed like a drama-bomb that was about to go off.
as a graphic designer, if i get a job printed for a client and it is delivered to them printed wrong, the client is going to come back to me... not the printer. it seems like here this is happening too... fans of the kidrobot products are just unhappy about the declining quality and KR is there to complain to... not the 'peasants' mistakes will me made obviously, but when someone releases as much as KR does, i would imagine they would have an established list of quality manufacturers at this point. right? maybe KR is moving to cheaper manufacturing centers as their volume continues to increase? if this is the case, a company like KR i think should be wiling to pay a little more in the process to ensure the quality stays up it's about the bottom line, but fans of these toys pay a lot for what they are getting and expect higher standards than a teenage mutant ninja turtle or something like that. my company just recently dumped a long term local printer for a much larger (and shittier quality) printer that is out of state in order to save money. the bigger the company gets, the cheaper they get on the small things. it's really annoying
without naming names..many of the designers that KR works with are 'difficult'..or perhaps..'artistic', dont primarily design for this sort of item and have unreal expectations etc. This comes from what is basically a 'shortage' of 3d able artists and lots and lots of 2D graphics artists being in the mix. I have direct experience with artists that WOULD NOT slightly change a sculpt or a pattern and the end result was a disaster. now..some companies (such as medicom) have pretty much side-stepped the issue by basically going mostly in house. KR wishes there was better QC as well. When we trie to do the Ledbetter/10" labbit 2 entire runs ended up being rejected, the project went like 50 grand in the hole and they just gave up because 2 different factories could not make a decent product. KR ate a huge loss on that project. This has happenned many times. It has put some small companies out of business, this manufacturing dilemma. also, another big problem is that the 'factory' is rarely the factory...your item is usually jobbed out to OTHER places in China that you have absolutley no way to know who really made it or whatever. and...most chinese manufracturing simply does not care since its usually money up front and if you dont like what you get theres no refund. HUGE attempts have been made to get these toys made in Canada, or Mexico or in the US, or Taiwan,,,but any rotocast places there have such HUGE minimums and costs are literally 10 times more...or they do not do rotocast anymore. its pretty rough. I am actuall amazed at how 'good' the quality, service level and turnaround times have been in the last 18 months or so. It was way worse back when. anyway, I know you will think im full of shit, but a LOT of effort goes into making these toys as decent as possible. Its not a question of 'poor quality' saves money. It costs the same whether a run comes out good or not. the basic problems are: 1. poor technology and infrastructure 2. low level hand manufacture 3. remote inaccessaible location no amount of money will solve this problem. I would say EVERY chinese made company its about 50% 'poor' quality every toy, every run, every company. I base my opinin on the fact that i have been involved with over 350 different rotocast toy projects, with basically, every company out there.
could a manufacturer opening up to do rotocasting in north america help the problem? maybe with the boom in these toys it could be worth someone's money and effort to open a production style place stateside where QC can be more hands on if if the rotocasting place here got enough business from lots of toy companies over here, then maybe it could be feasible? i have no clue obviously... just speculating i just thought about the soderbergh movie bubble where they made dolls in a factory.
If designers are not familiar with the limitations of pad printing and painting technologies, you would think that KR would educate them or set limits or guidelines for them. answer: because a lot of designers work would look completely different if someone else 'changed it' to suit a particular toy form, and KR is not going to do that. They may 'suggest', but usually the goal is to make the 3d form look like the 2d stuff. very few artists are designg 'strictly' on 3d. MOST of them example Camille Rose Garcia do 2d work and the 'toys' are suppossed to be like the 2d stuff, which is fairly impossible. this happens in spades when the artist or designer is like someone that does graffitti, or textile patterns or whatever is trendy. the BEST toys are like Pidgeons Happt Beaver..That toy looks awesome and the quality is excellent because he can actually do 3d turnarounds. the MAJORITY of designers dont do that. they might do a drawing or maybe lay out something on a template in illustrator and you can just tell they are not 'menatlly rotating it' in their heads. then you tell them a basic rule like 'no single component can be bigger than 60 degrees of an arc' and they just cant understand. while the toys LOOK simple, the way they HAVE to be made is not. example: you have a sphere, and you want a tripe to go all the way around it. theres only 2 ways to make that 1: 6 different pad print runs, each one lining up perfectly with each other and the ink batch over 6 days of printing to be EXACTLY the same. -nearly impossible 2: a handpainted stripe that is perfectly straight and consistent and that looks exactly the same on 1000 toys. -impossible. theres no other way. you cant make a 360 degree stencil. that stencil can not NOT have over/underspray. now, if these things where made ny mercedes benz, yes maybe..but they are not. they are made in a obsolete old crappy place in China.
1 . I have researched this extensively. the answer is NO. why? 1. Materials violate EPA laws 2. Volume of manufacture is not enough to make profit for the plant 3. the average toy is the result of maybe 25 people on an assembly line, maybe more. Wages and benefits for american workers are probably 30 times more expensive than for chinese workers. 4.paints and dies used in process are illegal for US manufacturing as well. there are places that will make you super insane amazing rotocast stuff....but theyt charge an avergae of say 5000-10,000 dollars for a batch of 3. These places are primarily prototype house for industrial applications. the closest i got was a small plant in Hayward that primarily makes components for cell phones and so on. they where willing to make me a 6" 'brick style toy', but only if I ordered 250,000 units..and they did not make packageing.
i never knew that the materials used in these toys are no go'ed by the EPA here. do you know why? am i helping to pollute more than i already do by supporting this industry? (this is actually a serious question despite it maybe sounding sarcastic) are all the toys' materials this way or only a certain type of plastic/paint/etc.? i am having a mini moral crisis here
mistakes will me made obviously, but when someone releases as much as KR does, i would imagine they would have an established list of quality manufacturers at this point. right? maybe KR is moving to cheaper manufacturing centers as their volume continues to increase? answer: impossible why? China. even toy2r, who is 100% down home Chinese has to play a constant rotating shell game. On a first batch, the factory will do a decent job, for a good price, to get your business. But then, they figure your hooked, they have your molds so the qulaity on subsequet releases goes down and they start charging more and blowing deadlines. So..you have to change companies. no one speaks english. you have to go through 'factors'. sometimes these factors are liars, sometimes they take your moey and no toy gets made. this is just a fact of liofe in Chinese Business. every toy comaony has to constantly play this crazy game. The 1 or 2 guys that are relatively honest and consistent are overwhlmed with orders, and they themselves are dependent on an ever chaging galaxy of subsidiary manufacturers. in China, its the wild west, there are no rules, no 'contracts'. its pay as you go and hey, if another job comes along that will make more money ( or paid a bribe) your job gets bumped down the food chain. talk to anyone that gets stuff made over there it is INSANE.
yes, pollution. your beloved Japanese Grade vinyls and paint are HIGHLY polluting and extremely toxic in their primary states. Thats why its basically an obsolete technology.
shit so i could be helping to give some poor japanese kid liver cancer from eating contaminated fish or something do they have proper cleaning/disposal techniques for the waste material or do they just not care? are there no suitable alternatives? EDIT: this seems to be a stupid question... i guess if there was a suitable (price and quality wise) alternative, it would be used at this point. duh!
Great information in here. pickle, if you're feeling bummed about some of your toys you know how to get a hold of me.
Are these kinds of toys becoming more and more obsolete, so they aren't coming out with any new technology?
I've looked into it, and unfortunately this scenario is unlikely, if not impossible for us in America. In case you didn't know, poly vinyl chloride can be hazardous to one's health. Over the years, domestic vinyl manufacturing has gotten more and more expensive because the factories have had to keep up with stricter and stricter OSHA safety regulations. Recent advances in manufacturing have allowed the vinyl-producing companies to convert their rotational molding equipment to use polyethylene, a much less toxic (and therefore less expensive) process. Unfortunately for us, polyethylene doesn't have the same properties as vinyl, and these factories also have minimum order quantities of tens of thousands of pieces anyway. I won't even go into the labor cost aspect of it. The picture that's been painted for me by people in the industry is that most, if not all manufacturers have now converted to the polyethylene process. It's a shame, too, because I found one factory right here in Saddle Brook, NJ that was actually making vinyl ET toys until a year or two ago. Of course, this doesn't rule out Canada (who I assume has stricter environmental regulations than we do) or Mexico (and they don't exactly have a stellar toy manufacturing record), but I'll leave that to someone else to investigate. EDIT: I just saw Frank's reply, too, and obviously he's been investigating this for much longer than I have. Unfortunately we've discovered all of the same dead ends. ;p
1. My experience is that Japan is highly polluted. 2. no 'acceptable' alternate materials exist. Vinyl is vinyl. it has that lustrous feel because it is in effect 'alive'..that means its constantly outgassing. Long molecular chains...the longer a molecule, the more unstable, especiallly when the solvents outgas and UV hits it. thats why it degrades. Now, you cant destroy or create matter, only transmute, so when the molecules in vinyl 'fall apart' they enter the biosphere, and, those molecules are toxic. you CAn make toys out of ABS ( hard plastic) but they do not feel the same, are way more expensive to manufacture, and the few companies that try it meet extreme resistance because 'collectors' dont like it. ABS wil take longer to degrade, but degrade it will.\\\the nicer and silkier the vinyl...the more solvents. the solvents are basically carbonhexa or tetra chloride ( like drycleaning fluid) the solvents are the primary polluters. thats why theres almost no more rotocast on any level in any countries with pollution laws.
not the toys, the materials. soft pvc is a cheap assed material. perfect for cheap, shitty toys, which is what 'kaiju' originally was.
Pickle, one more thing to bum you out aside from the toxicity issues: plastics are made from oil, oil that we and our manufacturers have to buy from countries we really don't like all that much. You could also argue that if we weren't making so many luxury items out of plastic, the price of the raw materials would go down so that the really essential stuff like syringes, PVC pipes, etc. would get cheaper and make peoples' lives around the world, especially in developing nations, a little easier, but that's probably stretching it. ;p
i cant believe on an otherwise nondescript saturday night i have found myself second guessing this collecting of mine
