by waaytoomuchintothis » Tue Feb 02, 2016 6:05 pm
A few years back, Ninco doubled their prices and lost most of their sales. They stubbornly stuck with this idiotic plan, and lost even more. At the time, their rep here in the states was a creep who lied all the time, tried to do sneaky stuff with dealers and publishers... Just an awful guy. That also caught up with them. Meanwhile, those of us who predated all that craziness suddenly had to look askance at an old friend who used to be one of the top 4 producers of quality scale slot cars.
Carrera never did raise prices and became the heroes. Scaley did some strange things and raised their prices some, but they never did lose track of what their customers wanted, Fly/GB Track collapsed in a heap, and Ninco pretty much priced themselves out of the market. It is impossibly dumb to try to sell the same car, which was enough quality for the price yesterday, at a price that is double, even triple the original price today. But then, they also tried that crazy "lets invent a new scale for no reason at all" excursion into 1/28th scale, too. They also dumped one of the best motors in the business and replaced it with a series of inappropriate ones. From what I read, the same decision making process is still at work at Ninco. We, here on HRW spent a week or more on a very active thread talking about what a great idea it would be for Ninco to get back in the market by selling bodies that are already popular that they have been making for years. Get the price down, and sell what you are good at in huge quantity, right? Its virtually a no-risk plan. That was two or three years back, maybe longer.