Mattel Releases Spring 2010 Plans for Justice League Unlimited

Since we are at the end of another fantastic year, I wanted to post a series of blogs taking a look back at 2009 for each of our major collector lines. First up: Justice League Unlimited:

JLU had quite an up and down year. In Jan, we were hit with some issues out of everyone’s control which delayed the singles and three packs and really tossed a wrench in the system. Arrgg. Not fun for collectors, lots of headaches for the brand managers at Mattel! The good news is all of the planned packs did ship, the not as great news is that distribution wasn’t as spot on as we planned.

But as we say time and time again, things in the toy industry change ALL the time. This is one reason we don’t like to reveal a lot of figures too far in advance. We’ll learn from everything in 2009 as we move forward into 2010.

Yup, I said that right. JLU is going to continue in Spring 2010 at Target stores. We’ll have some new figures to reveal at Toy Fair in NY at out collector event on Feb. 14th. Stay tuned!

We won’t however be continuing the Mattycollector.com 4 packs in 2010. At the end of the day, there just was not enough interest in the 4 pack assortment to keep it going. And yes, we have heard from collectors who were looking for more direct requests in the packs. Well, to level with everyone, that was never in the cards.

You see, for the 4 packs to work, we needed to sell a minimum amount of each pack to what we call the “die hard completionist” collector. Obviously some packs will sell better to others be it fans who only buy “in show” characters, or fans of a certain group like LOSH or Bat-villains. This factor might give each pack an added boost. But in order for the sku to work in the long run, we needed a certain baseline of fans who were interested in any JLU 4 pack offered regardless of theme. (This is similar to how the MOTUC line works BTW). While we offered a large variety of themed packs in 2009, we just did not hit the needed baseline to keep them going. (and we did have some more great ones planned!)

So while the 4 packs are going away, we are looking at other ways to keep JLU on MattyCollector in 2010 be it with older reissues, singles or some other surprises.

And as stated above, JLU will still be at Target stores in 2010. We have some great singles, 3 packs and 6 packs in store including many more fan demanded character, a return to Apokolips and a few out of the blue surprises we think JLU fans are going to love!

Mattel remains very committed to this line. As long as their are fans looking to purchase more JLU figures, we will do all we can to keep them coming. Considering Grodd was slated to be the very last figure, both the fans and dedicated members of the Mattel brand team have fought tooth and nail to keep the line going with a collector focus. We do read the message boards and hear fans requests. While we may not have gotten to every request, if you look back at the last 16 months, look at how many impossible or fan demanded characters we have been able to get to: The Question, Captain Atom, Cheetah, Batman Beyond, Mr. Terrific, Supergirl, Shazam… the list really does go on and on!

At retail we will still need to pair collector figures with more kid friendly selections to keep the line going, but you can be sure JLU will still be around, at least for the first half of 2010.