Hornby, A Model World. Series 2.

[Phatbob]

7 hours ago, spamcan61 said:

A good question, I'd say quite a few Bulleid Brakes and various MK3 coaches that have been at near fire sale pricing for a year plus, but there must be more than that.

 

Maybe there's a big pile of non railway stuff, Corgi perhaps.

As I've already stated in another thread, so apologies to those who've read this before, the reason for the surplus of Bulleid brake coaches is down to a failure or Hornby to properly market or package them, or both.  Unitil the mid sixties (1965 IIRC) these coaches always ran in a fixed rake of three, BSK-CK-BSK with their own unique set number.  The techie folk at Hornby obviously recognised this and they were produced at a ratio of 2 BSKs to every CK with the correct numbers to make up authentic sets.  However, the marketing folk didn't sell them in packs of three and sold them loose.  To make things worse, they made no effort to educate their customers and retailers as to nature of their use solely in sets of three.  Consequently, many a punter, unaware of their use in sets of three, seeing them for sale as lose coaches, purchased them as such.  Net result, the BSKs didn't sell in the ratio of 2:1 against the CKs as punters made up long rakes of CKs and Hornby are stuffed with a warehouse full of unsold BSKs.  This could have so easilly have been avoided, but it wasn't!

[RJS1977]

59 minutes ago, Phatbob said:

As I've already stated in another thread, so apologies to those who've read this before, the reason for the surplus of Bulleid brake coaches is down to a failure or Hornby to properly market or package them, or both.  Unitil the mid sixties (1965 IIRC) these coaches always ran in a fixed rake of three, BSK-CK-BSK with their own unique set number.  The techie folk at Hornby obviously recognised this and they were produced at a ratio of 2 BSKs to every CK with the correct numbers to make up authentic sets.  However, the marketing folk didn't sell them in packs of three and sold them loose.  To make things worse, they made no effort to educate their customers and retailers as to nature of their use solely in sets of three.  Consequently, many a punter, unaware of their use in sets of three, seeing them for sale as lose coaches, purchased them as such.  Net result, the BSKs didn't sell in the ratio of 2:1 against the CKs as punters made up long rakes of CKs and Hornby are stuffed with a warehouse full of unsold BSKs.  This could have so easilly have been avoided, but it wasn't!

 

On the other hand, they may well have sold more CKs than they would have done had they marketed them that way....

 

The question is - were there potential customers who decided not to buy the BSKs because there were no CKs to go with them?

[RJS1977]

On 12/07/2023 at 10:57, The Stationmaster said:

That decision will rest with whoever it happens to rest with,  If the new CEO thinks that it's useful to teh company's business and the tv production suggest doing it there may well be another series.  If neither or both of them see no value in doing a new series there's unlikely to be one unless another produvction company steps in and their proposal is accepted by Hornby.

 

Don''t forget that SK was basically a public face of Hornby while Montana wasn't the only brand manager who appeared in the most recent series.   The company is still there but things are changing hence a tv series might not be seen in the same light by the new CEO.

 

Or indeed by the TV company - as has been noted, Simon and Montana were two personable individuals who worked well on screen. Their replacements may not work as well.

[RJS1977]

8 hours ago, Legend said:

 

Not  forgetting there were substantial price hikes in the period too , which means unit sales must be down . That’s not entirely a surprise as I remember pointing out if you added up all the new announcements on the 2023 range , limited editions etc , the volume of product actually wasn’t that great . I do think Hornby still struggle with their suppliers . On the other hand what is in the mountain of inventory? 

 

Of course the fall in unit sales could be due to the price increases....

[PeterStiles]

7 minutes ago, RJS1977 said:

had they marketed them that way.

All they needed was some prominent "coach #1/2/3 of set XXX" markings on the box ends...

 

For want of 20 characters of text (including spaces)....

[RJS1977]

8 minutes ago, PeterStiles said:

All they needed was some prominent "coach #1/2/3 of set XXX" markings on the box ends...

 

For want of 20 characters of text (including spaces)....

 

But clearly there were purchasers who wanted a nice long rake of Southern coaches (and perhaps weren't too bothered about prototypical formations). 

Marketing as 1 of a set of 3 might have deterred people who bought the extra CKs, without actually increasing the number of BKs.

[RJS1977]

8 hours ago, HExpressD said:

I don't get the hate towards Playtrains if I'm honest. Okay, it's not high fidelity modelling but it's a bit of fun, the models are actually pretty good but most importantly it is the only range to my knowledge actively trying to encourage new blood into the Hobby which Hornby should be entirely applauded for. 

 

Unfortunately there is a somewhat snobbish and quite vocal element in the hobby who think that Hornby should only build what *they* want (i.e. very-high end models, £250+ locos and £100+ coaches), and stuff anyone who doesn't want to purchase those.

[Phatbob]

2 hours ago, PeterStiles said:

All they needed was some prominent "coach #1/2/3 of set XXX" markings on the box ends...

 

For want of 20 characters of text (including spaces)....

Or a simple cardbard wrapper holding the three boxes together.  As indeed thay had previously done for some Maunsel three coach sets.  Either way, it was one mighty c0ck-up IMHO.

[teletougos]

17 hours ago, MarkSG said:

They did, for example, significantly overestimate potential demand for their Olympic themed models back in 2012.

Yeah but that was a kind of silly era all over. I mean, I even heard someone say Mo Farah was a nice person. 

 

[MarkSG]

15 hours ago, Phatbob said:

As I've already stated in another thread, so apologies to those who've read this before, the reason for the surplus of Bulleid brake coaches is down to a failure or Hornby to properly market or package them, or both.  Unitil the mid sixties (1965 IIRC) these coaches always ran in a fixed rake of three, BSK-CK-BSK with their own unique set number.  The techie folk at Hornby obviously recognised this and they were produced at a ratio of 2 BSKs to every CK with the correct numbers to make up authentic sets.  However, the marketing folk didn't sell them in packs of three and sold them loose.  To make things worse, they made no effort to educate their customers and retailers as to nature of their use solely in sets of three.  Consequently, many a punter, unaware of their use in sets of three, seeing them for sale as lose coaches, purchased them as such.  Net result, the BSKs didn't sell in the ratio of 2:1 against the CKs as punters made up long rakes of CKs and Hornby are stuffed with a warehouse full of unsold BSKs.  This could have so easilly have been avoided, but it wasn't!

 

But that assumes that everybody buying those coaches wants a prototypical rake. You might, and I probably would if I was modelling the Southern. But we are not necessarily typical of most Hornby customers. People who just want stuff to run on a train set, or models to add to their glass case collection, don't really care about prototypical accuracy. They just want something that they can afford and that looks nice.

 

Packaging the coaches in sets of three would have restricted sales to people who really wanted three. Which is almost certainly a relatively small minority of customers. Most people would prefer to buy them singly. If they were only available in packs of three, then a large number of potential customers wouldn't have bought any. Even those of us who would run them in threes might still want a single coach in some circumstances, for example to replace one which was damaged. So selling them singly almost certainly increased overall sales.

 

Now, that doesn't mean Hornby didn't get their manufacturing levels wrong. It's quite likely that they did, in fact, overestimate demand from hobbyists and underestimate demand from collecters and train set owners, leading to a different balance of sales to that which had been predicted. But that's always going to be a difficult prediction to make. It could easily have gone the other way, overestimating demand from those unconcerned about prototype, thus leading to a surplus of CKs instead. It's easy to identify, with the benefit of hindsight, that a sales forecast was wrong. But without access to the detailed historical sales figures for different kinds of models and via different sales channels (which Hornby's marketing team does have, and we don't), anyone who confidently asserts that they could have done it better is, frankly, deluding themselves.

 

It's simply impossible to accurately predict future sales with 100% reliability, every time. Life doesn't work like that. Any manufacturer is inevitably going to have cases where stock is harder to shift than expected, and cases where they fail to make enough to meet unexpectedly higher demand. But so long as the predictions are mostly accurate, most of the time, that's good enough. Provided it doesn't happen too often, a company can live with the occasional prediction being significantly off the mark. 

[Hroth]

I might buy a couple of the Bulleid brake thirds to run as a SR version of a GWR B set...  🤪

 

[Keith J]

On 13/07/2023 at 18:19, RJS1977 said:

 

Or indeed by the TV company - as has been noted, Simon and Montana were two personable individuals who worked well on screen. Their replacements may not work as well.

Possibly, but the programme wasn't just about Simon and Montana, I thought some of the young designers came across very well.

[Guest]

Well with Simon and Montana now out of the picture, just supposing there is to be another series then it will certainly make quite interesting viewing!

[woodenhead]

Well if Series 1 and 2 were like Netflix's The Witcher then Series 3 will have all the same characters but with different faces.

[Guest]

Not familiar with the show as I don't have Netflix, so I couldn't possibly comment!

[The Stationmaster]

20 hours ago, R. Knowles said:

Well with Simon and Montana now out of the picture, just supposing there is to be another series then it will certainly make quite interesting viewing!

To see how many of the people who appeared in series 2 are still there ...

[Guest]

57 minutes ago, The Stationmaster said:

To see how many of the people who appeared in series 2 are still there ...

Mind you, I'm not sure that they could afford to lose any members of their design and development teams.

[The Stationmaster]

On 17/07/2023 at 11:14, R. Knowles said:

Mind you, I'm not sure that they could afford to lose any members of their design and development teams.

I wonder?  It really depends on which way they see things going and what the company can afford when it already has growing debt. But for those who like nostalgia I see the most recents eries is now being repeated on 'Yesterday'

[RJS1977]

I guess a question is whether the design and development staff, if they leave, leave of their own volition or are laid off. One factor there will be how transferable or otherwise their skills are.

[The Stationmaster]

11 hours ago, RJS1977 said:

I guess a question is whether the design and development staff, if they leave, leave of their own volition or are laid off. One factor there will be how transferable or otherwise their skills are.

I think what has been seen so far might only be the tip of a 'staff changes' iceberg at Hornby as the emphasis on sales and the 'capsule range' emerges from the new CEO's approach to tackling the company's financial problems.

[john new]

What is the capsule range?

[TEAMYAKIMA]

3 minutes ago, john new said:

What is the capsule range?

 

I'm glad you asked that question - I wanted to, but I didn't want to admit that I didn't know what it was - thanks.

[Phil Parker]

30 minutes ago, TEAMYAKIMA said:

 

I'm glad you asked that question - I wanted to, but I didn't want to admit that I didn't know what it was - thanks.

 

No one does - it's not been announced yet. I doubt we'll find out much before January.

[TEAMYAKIMA]

15 minutes ago, Phil Parker said:

No one does - it's not been announced yet. I doubt we'll find out much before January.

 

Phil,

 

I think you have slightly misunderstood my post. It's that I don't understand the concept as to what a 'capsule range' is - I have never heard that expression before.

 

If I was to make a guess, it would be Hornby's 'main focus' i.e. the question would be 'What will be Hornby's main focus moving forward?'

 

Edited July 21, 2023 by TEAMYAKIMA

[AY Mod]

11 minutes ago, TEAMYAKIMA said:

I don't understand the concept as to what a 'capsule range' is

 

No-one does; they've not explained it beyond a passing reference in the annual report.

 

Capsule has lots of interpretations.