| The Fall Doll Deluge | |
Right now, my living room floor looks like the receiving department of a large doll shop. Doll boxes are everywhere. My husband is appalled--in fact, I keep trying to intercept the UPS man before my husband can see any new boxes of dolls being delivered! My 5-year old daughter thinks Christmas has come early this year. And, the UPS man has personally thanked me for keeping him employed!
In the last
few weeks, I have received the following dolls and outfits: Madra Lord
(First Encounter and Black Widow), several Madra Outfits, Heart of Hollywood
Gene, I Do Gene, Bon Voyage Gene, and several Gene outfits. Fashion Editor
Barbie and the Fashion Models display case. Merlin and Moran Le Fay Barbie
and Key AND Adams Family Barbie and Ken....I could go on!!
If you are wondering what has caused all of this--no, I did NOT win a doll contest, and NO, I didn't just go out and order 20 dolls and outfits last week.
The dolls and outfits that are currently being delivered to my house in droves are dolls and outfits that I placed pre-orders for MUCH earlier this year. The same phenomena is taking place all across the US, Canada, Great Britain, Australia--in fact, worldwide, in the homes of doll collectors everywhere. The REASONS that there is this unbelievable Dolly Deluge every Fall for modern doll collectors are as follows:
1. Toy Fair/Doll Calendar. Most doll manufacturers have a grand unveiling of the dolls that they will produce for the year in February. This, of course, means that there are usually no new dolls produced for January and February. In fact, very few manufacturers have dolls announced at Toy Fair up and ready to go in March or April, either. The dolls, generally, start trickling in in late spring, and gain momentum from there.
2. Manufacturing: There are SO many new dolls announced at Toy Fair, that it simply takes time for manufacturing to get into gear, and this delays many releases from happening in the first half of the year. Plus, if there are any quality control issues, these take time to work out.
3. Christmas/Holidays. If YOU were a doll manufacturer, wouldn't you want YOUR hot, new, fantastic dolls available JUST in time for the Christmas and Holiday shopping season, so they are at the TOP of doll collector's minds then? Most doll manufacturers seem to factor this into the equation.
For some reason, these effects are multiplied several times over for the fashion doll sector.
However, the last-quarter doll rush actually has been IMPROVING in the last few years! Mattel, for instance, has been fantastic about spacing new releases throughout the year (it MAY have just been coincidence that THIS year the Fashion Model collection, the collection that MOST fashion doll collectors were eagerly waiting for, came in the fourth quarter--NEXT year, the Fashion Models will be spaced out, with Fashion Model Barbie releases already named for January and March. Tyler Wentworth was COMPLETELY delivered at the end of 1999--this year, Tyler and her outfits have definitely been better spaced. And Gene also has been spaced out better than prior years, HOWEVER, I must say that having ALL of the Madra Lord collection released in the past month or so compounded the end-of-year rush for all of the special, extra-limited Gene dolls that didn't get released until this quarter (Heart of Hollywood AND Bon Voyage Gene just came out, and they are each in a very small edition of under 3,500). And compounding all of THIS for fashion doll collectors this year, was the NEW release of the Eve doll by the Susan Wakeen company---JUST released in the last month.
I don't think that the Fall doll deluge will abate anytime soon, BUT I do think that doll companies are becoming more aware of the problem each year, and are trying to solve it--after all, they don't want collectors to pass up their dolls JUST because doll collectors get financially stretched in the last quarter.
Personally, I am going to be VERY selective with doll and doll outfit pre-orders in 2001, even for limited editions that I fear will sell out by the time of their release. That, you see, is the major rub--MOST doll collectors don't like to WAIT to order limited releases, because they are afraid that a favorite doll will sell out before they can order the doll. Witness Black Widow Madra and the outrageous prices on eBay right now--if you DIDN'T pre-order that doll, you have to pay several times over retail to get her. Of course, my pledge to selectively pre-order in 2001 are "famous last words," since they are the SAME words that I uttered at the end of 1999 for 2000--but then, at Toy Fair 2000, I met Madra and the new Genes and the Fashion Models and Eve.....
Back to the Doll Collecting Main Page
Denise Van Patten, © 2000. All rights reserved.
