VOICES OF ETERNIA: An Open Letter to Mattel and the Masters of the Universe Team

The following open letter is by MotuOriginsCork ( @motuoriginscork ) supporter and outstanding member of the Masters of the Universe fan community.

Open Letter to Mattel and the Masters of the Universe Team

Dear Mattel,

in light of the recent events it feels like things have to be said. 

Don’t worry this is not a rant. The purpose of this piece is to highlight concerns of the Motu community as a whole. While some aspects will be concerning specifically to the international community, others are echoing sentiments that should sound familiar to you by now and concern every single one of us.

Let me start with the Rokkon situation

Factually things seem very simple. The Masters of the Universe: Origins Rokkon figure was announced and then the drop was postponed due to what seems to be an issue with international shipping. This was communicated by you a bit late but clearly to understand, and on multiple platforms so the message could reach everyone.

But then when the second drop date approached and the message on Mattel Creations about the international shipping not being available was still in place, fans became anxious and reached out to you on the Mattel Creations forums and social media asking for guidance. To be fair if you were lucky, you could see your occasional response on some platforms stating that international shipping should be available by the drop date. But most people did not see that as you didn’t have any widespread communication or announcement about that. Still fair considering that you seemed to aim for a wide international release and seemed to have the hopes that you could manage the situation by the time Rokkon was supposed to be dropped.

Of course as we know now, this did not happen. Instead, very close to the drop time, you posted as a comment to one of your posts on Instagram that the site wide issue with international shipping is not fixed yet but that Rokkon will be available within a limited number of countries. Those are the same countries where you had expedited shipping and the prices included import duties. In other words, most of the world was locked out of getting Rokkon.

Now we understand that you had to choose between postponing it again or releasing it for a limited audience. Neither of which is a great outcome.

From the post of a Community Manager on the Mattel Creations forums, it seems like you understand how unfortunate this was and how many fans weren’t happy with that. It also looks like you are still trying to fix the shipping issue going forward. Sadly there is no clear communication about your plans besides watching the comments and social media. Hence this open letter.

What we hope you could commit to is that Rokkon will be made available once more, for example, like you did with Wun-Dar and Grizzlor.

Theoretically this could be a simple appeal for that purpose and this letter could end here. 

But this whole write up is connected to a few key issues that are underlying everything. Let me break these down for you:

Communication

As you are well aware communication with your customers/fans is important for a multitude of reasons. It helps make them aware of products that are available, drops or events. It also helps to keep them engaged and can make them feel a part of something. 

From a promotional perspective you are doing relatively well with this. But as you can see from the situation described above, there is room for improvement when something didn’t work. Why should you be invested in improving? Customer retention, damage control, control of the narrative and many more reasons.

To make this not too hypothetical, I will speak specifically about the issue with Rokkon and the international shipping limitations.

On the day you delayed the drop, your communication was acceptable. It was a bit late but your message was widely published on forums and social media alike. Once concerns were voiced by the community, this changed. I know that you did reply sporadically in comments across social media platforms but you had an opportunity to address the public’s concerns with a message that would address any questions by universally posting it on all your social media accounts and forum: Unified and with the intent to inform everyone. As a result most people did not receive the message you were trying to convey, that the drop will happen, only that a limited number of countries will be able to order and all other countries would not be able to.

You also still had the chance to clearly state what your intention was going forward. Of course saying that “We are unable to accept international orders for most items at this time.” hints that you are working in the background to fix this for the future. Yet it leaves so many questions open as it’s not a clear statement.

This is what your communication could have looked like:

“We are sorry to inform you at the moment international shipping to most countries is not an option. We regret this and are working on a resolution for this. We won’t be able to communicate the nature of this issue but please be assured that we value all our fans and customers no matter where they are from. We had to make this decision or stop all orders until the issue is resolved and we hope you understand that this is not an option for multiple reasons. While we don’t have a timeline for when we expect to be fully operational again, we want to ease your minds and let you know that we are exploring on how we can offer the items sold until then to everyone who missed out. This could be a second run or made to order offers similar to Wun-Dar or Grizzlor”

Of course this might not be reflecting exactly the situation but it should illustrate the empathy that is necessary for circumstances like this. Something similar to this was actually issued by the Mattel Creations Instagram Account for the Hotwheels drop last week. By far it was not detailed enough and left a lot of uncertainty about where international fans will be finding themselves going forward, but at least it is an official and easy to find statement that shows you care.

Just an observation, and of course I don’t know how you are structured, but I believe that whoever the person or people managing the community means well. It seems though that the messaging between social media and forums is not currently coordinated. On various platforms you find varying degrees of information or public statements and I fear that the people managing these platforms have little or no power over what can be pubically said before someone else approves it. At least this would explain the very late replies to questions or cookie cutter responses.

I am suggesting that the escalation path from your community engagement team to your executives be shortened which will allow a faster response time and a more direct way to interact with your community. If you haven’t done that already, I suggest that the various community managers are merged into a team or restructured with better coordination in mind.

Distribution

As you can see and surely know yourself, availability is very important, the ability to sell your product and on the fan side, ways to purchase that product. Fans worldwide have had various amounts of success finding your product to purchase. While some countries like Germany would still love to have improved availability, they at least have a large market and seemingly have your support, as seen by the example of Rokkon but also for regular waves typically found at retail. Fans in other countries around the world on the other hand, do not have the benefit of big retail chains where you can find MOTU product on shelves. 

I know you have a theoretical solution for that, namely distributors. While I’m not aware of Distributors in most parts of the world, by the stories I hear from fans around the world, it seems to be a similar situation as with HEO for the European market. 

In theory this should solve the problem of availability in smaller markets as big distributors would sell to any dealer within their region and you only have to deal with one entity instead of many. Great! Except that it isn’t. Theoretically all non-exclusive figures should be widely available through distributors but in reality, some do not make its way outside of the United States. Sometimes a single figure of a wave gets such a small contingent allocated that its virtually impossible to find them. Or as in the case of Leech, Snout Spout or Thunderpunch He-Man they don’t find their way here at all.

You can imagine how frustrating this is for any fan! Can you imagine how frustrating that is for fans that have to import the biggest part of their collection anyways and who usually pay far above the recommended retail price? Are you aware of the maximum amount of effort many fans have to put in, just to get the regular toy waves? 

Once again this should be fixed by having distributors but if they have to cancel orders from their dealers because they themselves can’t get figures they were told they can offer, for example Slamurai or New Eternia Skeletor, the dealers who try to look after their customers have to resort to importing from different markets, circumventing HEO and of course raising the prices once again.

Typically this is where I would try to offer a solution to a problem, but I cannot as I don’t know why regular figures can’t be shipped into different markets in sufficient quantities. I cannot say why HEO has to disappoint their dealers and in return the fans. Maybe this is something that you can look into? All I know is this situation has to improve.

Distribution is difficult. I understand this especially since you don’t handle it yourself and economically it doesn’t make sense to do it yourself. But it is something you should try to get a better grip on. Even in the U.S. fans suffer from inconsistent availability. In theory, Big retailers should solve this issue as they are available in proximity to pretty much everyone. The only problem is that you hear again and again that not all of their branches offer MOTU. This leads to some states being locked out of getting figures that the big retailers like Walmart and Target could make available to everyone. I understand that they have their own statistics about what sells where, but it doesn’t change the fact that an uneven distribution stays in place because of this.

And yes in theory they do offer nationwide shipping. But in reality there is a huge disparity between what is offered online versus what you can find in some select stores. They  recognize that some toys can drive more traffic to their stores and deliberately have items only available in the stores (this to be fair is just an assumption based on all the complaints you can read from fans and the reports of finding many copies of a figure in some stores while none are offered online or seen in other stores). Whatever the reason, this is locking out entire states while others have too much availability and then months later these end up in the bargain bin or get sold off to discounters.

When these retailers report sales numbers or place reorders, keep in mind that this does not reflect the actual demand.

Exclusives

This brings us to the handling of exclusives.

From listening to various interviews with Mattel employees, I can only believe that your efforts in regards to exclusives are with best intentions but result in many disgruntled fans. All the good will you have gets easily destroyed by communication, availability and the handling of exclusives.

From listening to you, it appears you believe the community wants exclusives to make us feel special when we manage to get them. A rare availability supposedly should give us the thrill of the hunt, an adrenaline rush when a drop happens and so forth.

I am sure you have the research and the data to prove that this is true to some extent.

But let me assure you and maybe your Community Managers can confirm this by quoting many of the community’s comments over the years on various platforms.

We take availability and the chance to complete our collections over the thrill of the hunt any day! 

We are not kids anymore, most MOTU fans are in their 40’s or somewhere close to to that.

Meaning, we have jobs we have to attend to and enough anxiety just to survive our daily lives. The artificially created anxiety of a limited drop is not a welcome situation. Many of us have to take time off work or bend our family lives just to be able to have a chance. Not even a guaranteed purchase but a chance to get the figures we want.

The same thing goes for availability of these exclusives outside of the U.S. Luckily you sometimes are offering these to your distributor. But as mentioned above, sometimes the preorder leads to cancellations because something happened that we are unaware of, a lack of communication and we can’t find one because of uneven distribution, and because it is an exclusive we once again have to import. But this is also not possible as Walmart and Target are not shipping outside the U.S. and don’t have online availability anyways. So you might be lucky if you have friend or family in the U.S. and you are especially lucky if the Target or Walmart in their area actually has the figure on a shelf.

This on its own is stressful enough but if you look at exclusives given to big retail chains like Walmart or Target it doesn’t end at a successful checkout. We then have to fear for weeks or months that they won’t cancel the preorder for ridiculous and often unexplained reasons, just to see again that some stores will have the product en masse while others do not and online availability is just non existent. So we implore you, please by the Power of Grayskull, stop giving them exclusives!

So there are a few solutions.

Firstly don’t make exclusive deals with retailers!

But if you insist, give it with retailers that do nationwide and international shipping and honours orders without cancelling them. Like BigBadToyStore or Entertainment Earth. I know you did this before and you will typically hear no complaints about that. Yes international fans again will have to pay extra but we have to do that anyways, usually!

Another solution of course is Mattel Creations. We acknowledge that you increased your efforts on that front. We see that even regular wave figures find their way onto that platform.

We also accept exclusives there because of the international shipping… which is the current dilemma of course but hypothetically this is acceptable.

Yet there is room for improvement. Once again your Community Managers will be able to attest that most of us don’t want the anxiety that comes with limited drops. We don’t like to fear we could be missing out, we don’t like to be forced to resort to aftermarket prices if we missed out for whatever reason.

We would be very pleased if all your Mattel Creations releases were made to order offers with a one to five day order window. This will give us plenty of time to place our order and avoid the scalpers in the after market. This will even keep the exclusive nature of a figure in place.

After all is said and done we, also know that MOTU today is only a small part of Mattel. We are not relevant as we once were, we are not as big as Barbie, we are not as big as Hot Wheels.

But we are among the most dedicated fans there are!

We are here despite all of the points above and we are appealing to you! We know that among your ranks are many of us. Fans since their childhood that want to do the best they can for the fandom they are part of. We ask you to enable them to do this! Give them the resources to communicate properly with us, give them the power to find better ways of distribution, listen to the nature of exclusivity and what good it can do but also what damage it can do as well.

My sincere hopes are that you can take these words to heart and maybe by the time you have your Mattel Creations Revealed Event in March, there is something you want to talk about to us.

Forever a fan

MotuOriginsCork

“VOICES OF ETERNIA” is a series of articles that features members of our wonderful community who have something to share. From a personal experience to a constructive editorial piece, or perhaps a personal collection they want to show off, “VOICES OF ETERNIA” can be the place to share it.

Do you have something you would like to contribute? Please email us at ForEternia@gmail.com and let us know what you would like to share!