To whomever posted this originally you are so spot on that I want to tattoo this backwards on the foreheads of all of upper management in mattel so they can read it every morning when they look in the mirror.
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The title of this post is the best thing I've read on this board so far, and I've been around (few times a week) for almost a year. Thank you OP.
Well, said friend. But when it does come for them they will have millions of blood money saved unlike the seamstresses & regular working class people at Mattel who actually did the work but get zero credit & got laid off. All the EVPs, SVPs could care less about the company. The last great CEO that Mattel had was John Amerman. He knew a good toy and the people who made that toy happen. Design was pretty much left alone to Design, Engineering to produce, & Marketing to market/sell it in. Slowly but surely those days went away so now it's just a big cluster F. Yes, quality is subjective, but it shows itself very clearly. An action figure that is sculpted improperly with disproportioned parts & poor deco does not show quality, it's called a pirated knock off. Arrogance, Greed, & Stupidity got Mattel where it's now. Enjoy.
Sadly the words "value" and "quality" are extremely subjective terms. What some people believe is quality from an "artistic" point of view is not necessarily what your Walmart buyer cares about. And let's face it that's Mattel's customer.
We throw around Hasbro's "quality" etc blah blah blah but that has all to do with the property not the toy as much. Again let's face it Hasbro has made the decision 3 - 4 years ago they are going to make a bigger play for content. That meant a big shift for them and a large investment in creating their own content. That meant hard times in the beginning. But they saw it coming. They didn't make a PgP type group that doesn't have the teeth nor funding to do anything. I mean they tried to buy Dreamworks for gods sake. That should indicate something. Mattel tries to do everything rather than focusing. Truth is nowadays if you want to be a big company with big brands you need to have a big play for content. It's gotta be a priority. Otherwise we're all just talking to ourselves and pointing fingers at each other while the ship goes down.
For all RDs promise of a return to greatness for me personally I feel it's been a sad disappointment. Oh well, he'll get to be CEO and we'll all be knocked down to another lower level of hell while he enjoys his success.
And like the Red Death,the party goes on for the elite behind closed doors hoping to ignore the plight of their people, until one day it comes for them as well.
Knowing exactly what a product costs to manufacture is indeed quite different than realizing what a product is worth, or worth buying. It's called quality. Someone's dream/vision, which is something that comes from a passion that someone had in their heart & minds eye to champion a product & create it. It doesn't come from useless meeting after useless meeting where stupid upper mismanagement has to put their finger print on it, & cost reduce that dream into a label sheet. It's an easy comparison. Just compare Mattel's current cost reduced crap to what Lego, Hasbro, or Thinkway is selling. Legos profit is up & just wait until their new Star Wars product is at retail. Ditto Hasbro. Disney is going hit a Grand Slam this Christmas while Mattel keeps laying off low level workers as Sinclair, Kevin Farr, & Richard Dickson keep blaming the headwinds @ the end of each quarter that no other toy company suffers from but Mattel. The sky is falling as Icarius/uppermangement flies too close to the sun. Design by committee is a disease that has been at that place for way too long now and has spread like Ebola. Someone call the CDC and quarantine that place.
The self proclaimed toy guru S Nietlick was a fool who drank his own KoolAide just to hear himself talk on speaker phone. I'll never forget when he & all of the Voss peeps were walking around the DC yelling out that they were printing money with the awesome Green Lantern movie that was coming up. Trips back & forth to the studios, assorted name dropping, trips to HK, admiring their awesome product sculpts that all looked the same. They even tooled up an entire mini line..........after SDCC Self proclaimed toy guru hauls back these huge master cartons of a SDCC exclusive Light up Green Lantern large figs that these idiots thought they were going to sell for $60.00 They may have sold 10, maybe 20. Mr toy guru then drags out these huge shippers of SDCC GL figures and writes FREE to take. He placed them all over the DC. Nobody even took them, couldn't give them away, literally. HeMan, they were selling these MOTU Collectable figs @ less than half off in that huge tent during Christmas. They were finding hidden pallets of HeMan unsold product all over the place. He actually talked Doug W into spending tooling $ on this god awful ugly baby Skeletor? What fools.
The Movie ventures were/are ridiculous. Totally pointless and not worth crap. People want to see a hot wheels movie about as much as they want to see a sequel to Speed Racer. He-Man? Maybe, but let's be honest the masters of the universe and the DC crap have all been lackluster sellers regardless of how many interviews that half-a-tard toy guru did back in the day. Max steel is only popular overseas in depressed third world countries. What's next? that god awful train with a face in a feature length movie? Guess what? Disney is going to blow that property out of the water with their movie "Trains" in the next year or so. Thomas is living on borrowed time at best. Voss, Dickson & Sinclair all need to go so we can get back on track to profitability.
Here's the deal, straight up. Another talented, hard working seamstress with a kid in college gets laid off. Who cares, right? She gave 25 yrs. plus to this place but so what? Wake up Sinclair & Dickson & the the frigging math!!!!!!!!!!!!!Why is Dave Voss & his Playground Reductions group still there? Let's review. It does take a MIT grad to do the math on that groups ROI. Stands for Return on investment. What happened to Max Steel the Movie? What happened to Hot Wheels the Movie ? What happened to Heman let's beat a Dead Horse the Movie? Guess what? all under Dave Voss. I know, let's eval BoomCo the Movie. Let's do another New, Next, Never.............WTF? yet they all waltz around with titles of Producers? Shane Amsterdamn? What the hell has he produced? Zero!!!!!!!!Scott Derman got himself on Adam Corolla's "To Catch A Contractor" while he was supposed to be working and didn't even get any Mattel product placement in the background of his f'ed up house? Let's fire some more hard working people so these lazy idiots walk around doing nothing. Somebody count their salary times 10, times 5/6 years vs. what profit they have generated. Mattel changing the culture? Get real. Come on Dickson, do something, be somebody :)
We were in a meeting with one of the bean counters and he was finding ways to cost reduce everything.
After the meeting one of the participants said, "That man knows the cost of everything, but the value of nothing."
Sadly, that has been the mindset of the carpetbaggers in upper management at Mattel for the past 10 or 20 years. Take out those two deco ops, but keep flying First Class and riding around in limos.