Eclipse - void & Griffith 2013

Aazealh said:

You make me laugh man.

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Aazealh said:

But that cycle should have been broken long, long ago. I feel that it's too late now.

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Aazealh said:

What the fanbase needs is for new companies to get into Berserk merchandise.

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Genome said:

knecht, when you started your topic, i think you didn't think it will go that way about AOW

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Genome said:

object: Costumers = stupid ?

We nearly waited 2 years for this one and the result is a deep, deep, deep ugly statues without any respect for faces and scales.

I believe that most of your product are too expensive, ugly, repaint or re-used statues.

My message is aggressive and I won't make any apologies on it because you are considering us as shits.

Regards.

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andrewdsz said:

I just sent mine email. Mostly cursing and pissing words. I don't care, they are getting more and more disgusting.

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Walter said:

Tact is a useful weapon. Learn to use it.

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Thank you very much for contacting us.
Regarding your e-mail, we sincerely apologize that we could not answer your wishes well in the past. However, we hope you can understand that we have tried our best to do good things for our customers, though we know that we have to do better. We received complaints like yours, but we also received many good words. We always try our best to answer our customers wishes, but it is really difficult to satisfy everyone.

We appreciated your loyal support, and we hope in the soon future we can have the chance to serve you again, with a real good product.
Thank you again for contacting us and sincerely apologize for being so unhelpful.

If you have any concerns or questions, please feel free to contact us at any time.

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Genome said:

I agree but in aow case I don't know if it make sense.

aow reply and as I thought, their reply is just a stand email:

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andrewdsz said:

this is a joke.

I got an exactly the SAME email. Not a word more, not a word less.

Lol.

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Walter said:

I am shocked they didn't take your emails seriously!

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Dr.Legato said:

No offence, but why should they care about some frustrated foreigners complaints? They are a bunch of stubborn Japanese businessmen who keep selling out every time...

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Aazealh said:

Their business practices are such that they now release statues in extremely limited numbers. 50 sets, in this case. Of the customers buying those 50 copies, quite a few are foreigners. That's why they should care.

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...Now, this represent the overseas customers, we don't know much about Japanese customers but since you are making only 50 or 100 units of your lasts products, and counting the members of our community, I believe that you don't have much Japanese costumers left.

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Thank you very much for contacting us.
We feel sorry to hear that you do not like our new products. Sincerely apologize to make you disappointed.

However, we still hope you, as our loyal customer, can understand our company’s situation. It is not our wish to just repaint our old models and sell them to the new customers and let our old customers be angry about the new release. Of course we want to create new things! There are so many great scenes we have not did yet, and so many characters we want to make them real. Our dream is the same as yours.
But, the economic situation now did not allowed us to do many new statues for our customers. We feel sorry to tell you the truth, we have to do repaint ones, otherwise we are not able to plan for a brand new one. Also the price is higher and higher, just because the cost of everything is higher than before, since our factory is in China, we are not able to low down the cost for the statues. Sorry to be so unhelpful, and thank you for your kind understanding.

Moreover, the new statues are smaller than before because they are a 3-figures set version. And if we really do this new release into big size like 1/6 or 1/8, it will be really expensive and we do not think any of our customer can afford it.

And, about the faces of the statues. We have received many requests about to make the face better. We are really considering about this carefully, but, since our statue designer already has his style, it may take some time for the changing.

We really appraciate you giving the special space for us in your forum. It is very interesting and we can get the very true voices from our customers. We saw them happy with the arriving of the products, and feel sad to hear them laughing at our new products…Please kindly keep this space for us, thank you! Now we are going to try our best to reply Mr. andrewdsz and Mr. Genome, hope we can give them a good answer.

Thank you again for your reading and supporting us for a long period.
If you have any concerns or questions, please feel free to contact us at any time.
Have a nice day.

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Thank you for taking the time to respond to my email. Once again, apologies for the barrage of my words, and for the words of the others that may have emailed you. We do not mean to make you feel sad or hurt, but really we just want to express to AOW how dissatisfied we are.

In regards to repainting older ones to plan for new ones... humbly speaking, I've worked a bit with sculptors and casters... from start to finish. In my eyes, I don't see why you would need to sell repaints in order to fundraise to commission a new piece. What it sounds like is that you need to find a new sculptor, or new sculptors. There is A LOT of talent out there. I know for certain that you can find someone who can do better work for you guys. There are even many talented sculptors on our forums. And if you want to commission out to somebody in China, look up skink.us and you will find his amazing sculpting capability. And if not a whole sculpture, perhaps you could commission somebody to sculpt the faces of your statues. I am 100% positive that if your statues have better faces, that sales will improve.

Take for example your Gantz Katou statue. I emailed AOW many months ago when I heard the news that you will be releasing Gantz statues. I was thrilled!!! Berserk is my favorite manga by far, but I'm also a huge fan of Gantz so I was very much looking forward to your statues. Unfortunately, when the Katou pictures released, I emailed and stated how disappointed I was with the face of Katou. I begged for you to reconsider, and to re-do the face before release. However, my request and advice was not taken seriously enough. Now, I can clearly see that Katou has not been selling well on your website. Moreover, I've seen them on Yahoo Japan Auctions and selling for much cheaper. Case in point, just this morning, look at what I won on YJ Auctions: http://page13.auctions.yahoo.co.jp/jp/auction/r99673670

I won that auction for 10,000 yen! Brand new, unopened. Can you believe that your Katou statue, that retails on your site for 65,000 yen, is now worth a market value of 10,000 yen? As much as I would like to support AOW, I could not bring myself to purchase this Katou statue with such a unpleasant face for full value. I knew for certain that fans would agree with me so I decided to wait to buy it second hand. And I was right.

The same rule applies to your Berserk statues. I've gotten to the point now, that I will just wait to buy these statues second hand. I want to support you, AOW, but your prices just don't match the quality of your products anymore. At least, with proper likeness and proper face resemblance, there is more reason and justification to purchase your products... but if the statue is an inferior product, then there really is no incentive to buy except for the completist collectors. But as you can see with me... I used to be a completist collector as well, but I've had enough. We are being taken advantage of and AOW has taken our loyalty for granted.

I understand your logic about selling a smaller 3 set piece will be more affordable than selling a larger 3 set piece, but at this point, I think you would be better off concentrating on SINGLE and NEW characters at the 1/10, 1/8, or 1/6 scale. I guarantee you, that more buyers will be interested in a single QUALITY product over a set of smaller and lesser quality products. For example in this case, if you made a proper high quality 1/6 - 1/10 scale Void with supreme details throughout his body, cloak and most importantly his face, on top of a simple but elegant base of the red faces... I would have been GLAD to pay anywhere from 30,000 - 60,000 yen depending on the size. It shouldn't cost AOW extra to have a sculptor make a GOOD SCULPT, with proper details, and a face with good likeness. This should be a given for any sculptor you hire. If your sculptor can't get faces correctly, then frankly, you should strongly consider getting someone new.

Anyhow, please take my words into consideration. Now, with the new Berserk Trilogy Saga Project and future Berserk anime underway, it is the best time for AOW to take advantage of your Berserk license and pump out AMAZING products. There are new Berserk fans everyday. Even my humble statue website has received an influx of views and emails from new collectors, ever since the new Berserk movies have come out. It is not too late for AOW to change their business model and put out statues of the quality deserving of such an amazing story. Please consider.

- Derek

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Thank you very much for your letter. We really appreciate you support us for so long a time and give us these kind suggestions.
We have received your messages, maybe also from the people in your forum, we thank you for loving our products so much and try so hard to help us do better. Thanks for all of you, our precious overseas customers.

We will have a meeting about the suggestions you told us, and see what we can do for our future products:
1. Better the design of the statues, especially the faces.
2. Change the size of the statues, 1/15 is thought to be too small and it better be 1/8 or 1/6, at least 1/10.
3. Create new scenes and new characters, not repainting again and again.
4. Low down the price.

We are sorry that we cannot tell you how much we can do for these suggestions, because we are not able to change so quickly and a company cannot just do what their customers told them to do. We believe you can understand this. We received your suggestions, and we also received a lot of voices saying that they love our new release very much… We just want you to know that we will read and carefully answer every letter from our customers, sometimes we are unhelpful and really do not know how can we satisfy our customers, but we will try our best to.

We sincerely apologize to disappoint our loyal customers, but we hope that you can support us in the past, now and in the future. Thank you very much.

If you have any concerns or questions, please feel free to contact us at any time.

Thank you again for your support.
Have a nice weekend.

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Thank you very much for your last letter. We have had a meeting about your suggestions, and discussed about the problems of our product. We think maybe you want to know some of our discussions, therefore we write this letter to you.



1. Regarding the design about the statues, we always try to prove our skills. Compare to the products several years ago, we have the confidence to say that they really get much better. We know that it is not good enough, but we believe we will do better and better in the future.

2. Regarding the size of the statues, we will hear our customers voice. We will try to avoid making small statues, such as 1/15 scale Void, and make bigger size next time.

3. We have received some customers request ask us to re-create new scenes and new characters, that is what we always want to do. However, as we have done some sub characters in the past which we believe you already knew them, the result is that they were not sold well and brought us very big lost. Our situation is not good these years, and we may never release a product over 100 pieces again. We have to be careful about planning new things, even if we want to, we will not do if we are not sure it can be sold out safely. Therefore we really thank you for giving the space in your forum, and if you can convener 50 people to ask for the same character or the same scene, it will be a really useful voice for us to do as you wish. That is a power which can only be recalled by your customers.

4. About price, it is really a problem for our overseas customers. Some of you have to afford high shipping cost, and an unbelievable high customs. This makes the price more unacceptable for our overseas customers. We really understand your concerns.

There are many reasons caused the high price of our product, but the main reason is every time we just produce 50 to 100 pieces now. This made the cost of every piece very high, much higher than other figure making companies. And in the near future, we will not change the quantity of every release, so it is really hard for us to low down the price as our customers’ wish. We are now trying some other ways, like to have a cooperation with other overseas companies, and maybe it is a way to change the present situation. But it is a speak about the future.



We hope you can accept these answers, as we always tell our customers, we will try our best to answer their wishes, but we are a company, we have our reasons which our customers cannot imagine. Therefore when we are unhelpful, we can only hope our customers can understand us, and support us as always.



Thank you very much for your reading and for all you have done for us.

If you have any concerns or questions, please feel free to contact us at any time.



Thank you again for your support.

Have a nice weekend.

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DirectDK said:

In regards to what I bolded up above (I bolded it, not AOW), I'll start a new thread. It's unlikely we can get a general consensus of 50 people but let's just see how it goes...

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