Hi everyone! Wow, what a BreyerFest it was! I hope everyone who bought tickets had a great weekend. We played the livestream the entire weekend and watched other videos once it ended. (If you haven't watched them yet, Liz Isham Cory's hobby history video and Andrea Gurdon's "Models of a Different Color" video will be of great interest to other history buffs like me out there.)
So much great content to watch - I haven't seen everything yet, so I better get on it! Everyone worked really hard this year to put out great videos, and I want to enjoy and appreciate every one of them.
Personally, I was able to purchase all the store models I wanted for my personal collection, as well as my assigned Special Runs, all before noon on Friday. That was a great change from last year - I was able to relax and enjoy the livestream once I had my ponies collected.
I'm a big fan of the changes they made this year, notably an increase in available quantities of event models. I believe most everyone was able to get the Limited Editions they wanted during the event. That's wonderful - We love seeing people get the horses they love. It also reduced "hoarding" by certain resellers, since 1) Each account was limited to one of each model each day, and 2) increased quantities mean that fewer people will be seeking them aftermarket, so there's not as much incentive for resellers to try to snatch them up in droves. Kudos, Breyer!
Special Runs, of course, were still very limited, and some went quickly. I think Breyer was surprised how quickly the rainbow decorator Valegro sold out. The Special Run system was fairly handled, with ticket holders sending in their preferences ahead of time, and then Breyer filled those by choosing the customers in random order and giving their highest available priority models at the time their order came up for filling. This was all done before the event, so we were all able to checkout our assigned SRs on Friday morning. Brilliant!
The only complaint I heard (and I consider it a very minor one) is that there weren't very many grab bags available, and once they sold out on Friday, they were gone for good, so those who were working (or sleeping) Friday morning had no shot at any of the grab bags except Celtic Fling and a swag one. But that's extremely minor, and I don't necessarily think that releasing them in batches like last year would have been better - Doing that just increased the number of people constantly refreshing the screen, which slowed the entire site down all weekend last year. That was completely avoided this year, so again, I think they made a good choice.
We will have a few Breyerfest items available for sale on our site once they arrive. We aren't taking reservations prior to arrival, because we haven't decided what's staying here and what's going to become available yet. Stay tuned to our site!
Next year's Breyerfest theme has been announced: Prost! A German Celebration will be 2022's theme! How exciting!
Scheduled Price Changes
We knew they were coming - Breyer warned us ahead of time and we warned you in an earlier blog post. The price increases have landed. We received our new pricing around noon today and have now updated our site. Increases were mainly in the $1 - $3 range, nothing as scary as we expected.
Breyer allows retailers to change prices on Traditionals released in January as of July 1, and that usually means some models will drop a bit in price. There were fewer drops this year because of the increases, but also because of the timing, most of the new models did not increase but stayed pretty much the same. One thing balanced the other.
Some models HAVE dropped in price a bit as well. You may see this with a couple of Traditionals, but also in the Classic and SM lines.
Mid-Year Release Updates
Now that BreyerFest is over, we expect the new Mid-Year models to ship to us. We know they've had them in their warehouse for a month or so, but this year, they decided to wait until after the event to ship to retailers. If you've pre-ordered them, keep an eye on the item pages for updates. When they arrive, we'll start shipping pre-orders right away. When your order is ready to ship out, you'll get an email with a tracking link so you'll know to watch for their arrival.
ETA Round-up (per Breyer):
Have a great summer, everyone! (...And a great winter to our friends south of the equator!).
~ Eleda