My base thinking is all 1/6 seems over priced. Hot Ttoys should be 200 give or take depending on extra sculpts. Clothing is cheap to make, but sculpting is where to tooling is at.
Leather maybe???? Doubt it....as leather is relatively cheap, but not sure about the 1/6 scaling how that works.
1/6 scale clothing isn't cheap. Anyone who's been part of custom runs knows this. Full custom 1/6 clothing runs cost about the same if not more than this whole figure will be.
Leather work in 1/6 is even more expensive. It cost me ~$275 to get a real leather coat made for the HT 1/6 Redskull since the pleather was falling apart. That's just the coat, not even a full costume. And that was on the cheaper side compared to other tailors that do real leather work.
It's no different than a real 1:1 human leather jacket costing more than a fake leather jack. Better materials simply cost more. Just getting about 18inches of real, quality scaled leather straps to use for 1/6 belt making costs me about $3/each depending on color, size and thickness. You might say that isn't much, but the same straps in pleather cost about $1.00.
The base body is probably the original WS body with a newly sculpted arm and head.
You're most likely correct. just some tweaks to whatever padding they use to bulk it out
Maybe rooted hair is hand sown or something and not done via machine, but yeah sub 300 is what I THINK it's worth, but they will charge 450 dollars. If people are willing to pay it, then Hot Toys should do it as that is capitalism
the hair isn't sewn in. The wool is manually glued and styled by hand. From what we know, factory workers had to be trained to do this; therefore, the "rooted" hair isn't done by a machine which is why InArt's rooted headsculpts come with such varying degrees of quality. It's a very labor intensive process and why most custom artist charge no less than $300 just to do the hair work.
Yes, these are mass produced products, but to say that these should be cheaper frankly just shows how uninformed some are of how much cheaper these sorts of updates that companies like InArt and HT are implementing really are compared to where the cost of things like rooted hair and real leather upgrades originate from.
We're getting full figures with moving eyes, real leather (at times, should be always though), and rooted hair for the price of a custom 1/6 dress suit.
Do I like paying these prices? No, of course not. But, I do understand why they cost this much.