Re: Molecule8 - 1/6th Scale John Lennon
Michael, what's you take on this company? I'll understand if you refrain from the question.
I posted the following to this thread way back at the beginning of May:
"This thread is pretty amazing - I find the psychology of it all fascinating. I don't want to be a wet blanket, and there's some things they are discussing that sound fantastic to me, from licenses to innovations. But there's also reality, and several things just don't add up right now.
- there's no way in Hell anything is shipping to customers within the next four weeks if they don't have a production sample in hand right now, let alone not even a prototype. Now maybe they already have production samples in hand and just aren't showing any photos of anything yet...but I'm not sure why they'd do that. The concern here is they remain adamant that Lennon will be shipping, even when that seems impossible, with no explanation for how it could be possible. Even if we get prototype photos by the end of this week - that's what we heard, correct? - I don't see how anything can be ready to ship to customers for several months.
- the new body looks great, but something doesn't seem to jive with the Lennon head sculpt. The body is clearly not 'traditional', but the head and neck sculpt we've seen is. Perhaps we'll see a skin covered body/neck that a traditional head can just pop on, but that's not what we've been shown so far.
- does this guy have extremely deep pockets? He must - he didn't use a funding source like Kickstarter, but undertook what would easily cost hundreds of thousands of dollars just to develop this new body and skin technique. Now, at the end of the process he has $300,000 of collector's money, certainly no small potatoes, but that's after all the development and fixed costs are complete.
- where did this guy come from? Howard Chan didn't start making a perfect sixth scale figure day one - it takes time and practice to hone the craft, just like anything else. He also didn't start out with a dozen well known licenses without ever producing a figure.
As much as I'd love to believe...or 'imagine'...something seems off. Now it's possible that this is all absolutely true, and by June 1st the lucky early adopters will be happily cradling their John Lennon. I suspect the reality will fall someplace in between, with lots of delays, lots of excuses, and product eventually in our hands in early 2018. Worst case scenario, the mystery man disappears with $300k.
Like I said, I'm hoping we get everything they've promised - it seems fantastic. But it's simply too good to be true, at least to my pragmatic brain. And I'm also very glad their first announcement wasn't the Gene Wilder Willy Wonka, because then the odds of my $300 being on the table would have gone up considerably."
In the intervening 90 days, I've talked with Vijay personally and interviewed him for the podcast. I think he's a great guy with big plans, but I have to admit that very little of my above concerns have been answered so far. As far as shipping anything goes, I'm still holding to an early 2018 assumption. We still no almost nothing about the new body and how it will work. We DO have more info on Vijay and where he comes from, and like I said, I think he's a solid guy. I don't think he's splitting town with everyone's money, but I do think he's embarked on a project that is a lot more complex than he and his partners assumed, with very little industry insider expertise. He's leveraging lots of interesting outsider knowledge, including using people from other industries that have skills that could create new insights...but you also need some folks that understand the current reality.
So while I don't think it's a scam, I do think there's still a serious lack of info, and no way anyone is going to have a Lennon figure in their hands this month.
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