A Half Year in Review @RMIt is three more weeks before Q2 new releases getting shipped. Box arts, waterslide decals, and the assembly instruction sheets are all done and scheduled to get printed. All the moulds (8 in total for this batch of new releases) are officially signed off and ready for their first production run.
It has been a long wait for many of our customers; the motorcycle project is a year old! We had spent over a year to setup our digital sculpting workstations, and to refine and improve our sculpting skills – not an easy task if you already have lots of projects on hand. The bottleneck had always been mould making; making figure moulds need a very different approach than doing vehicles, and take more time to finish.
During the first half year of 2017, we had been struggling to get all projects up-to-date; trying to wrap up all outstanding ones so that we can start afresh with new projects. Here is a review of what we have done so far…
- Completed about 50% of all our 2016 projects.
- The remaining 50% should be all done by Christmas this year.
- Set a deadline of 9 months (from start to finish) for all new projects.
- Creation of digital libraries for common multi-variant tanks, such as the M4 Sherman, Panzer III, and Panzer IV will continue.
- Our digital sculpting team had doubled its size to handle our current and new workload.
- Our vehicle design team is also expanding to include more talents to handle new projects.
Plans for the Rest of the Year- At least two new product ranges in 1/56 (28mm) scale before Christmas.
- With the purchase of several Neucraft resin kits in May, we are looking into producing more resin products to complement our existing plastic range.
- We are going to phase out some earlier item codes and replace them with new designs. This will include the M4 Sherman and the Panzer IV. The Panzer III will be next on the list!
- Some existing item codes sell far better than expectation, and we are already scheduling new production runs for them. We might remaster some parts to further improve the overall quality of our products.
- Continue creation of figure templates and digital libraries for various WW2 countries. We will not do any plastic miniature box sets until we had fully mastered the art of multi-part figure design.
- Prioritise our Forum Wish List and incorporated some of the vehicles into our current production list.
Plans for Next Year- Too far off to start a list, but we are expecting a physical location in Europe, much like what we did for North America last year, to handle our sales and marketing activities.
- Hint Hint -
Rubicon Models will not bound ourselves to simply focusing on 1/56 scale or WW2. We are a design studio and will do what we are best at - Create & Design!
We are very open to suggestions, and your feedback are always welcome, but might not get answered due to various reasons. We are glad we had the chance to meet a few of you at shows and conventions; we hope we will be able to do that as often as possible for the remainder of the year!