Bulk Miniatures?

[Starfighter Decals]

Are Minis available in bulk from distributors? I saw a vendor at a swap meet over the weekend who offered many of the ADB minis in bulk, i.e. no packaging. I asked about it and he said thats how he gets them from his distributor. I found this quite odd so I'm asking if this is legit or not?

[botwt]

They are probably knock offs...lots of other manufactures get nabbed like this. You can find all sorts of knock offs on eBay...it's sad what people will do to make a buck off someone else's work.

[Bolo_MK_XL]

If it was at a swap meet (flea market) then many things could have happened --

Many vendors hit estate and yard sales and pick things in bulk/boxes, many don't even know what they have --

Others nab things from closed hobby shops owners that had things in storage for years --


You can ask how they aquired them --

[Steve Cole]

No, and rarely yes.

When we sell to a distributor or a store, we use "retail" packaging, which means clamshell plastic small box type stuff.

When we sell mail order, we sell them in bags since the retail packaging costs more than most of the ships and players just throw it away anyway.

Rarely, in some special cases, we will sell stuff in bags to Retailers, but that may amount to a dozen such bags per year.

I'd be interested in knowing who was doing this "bulk selling" since he's either taking them out of retail packaging, manufacturing his own ships illegally, or buying them from gamers on Ebay.

[Starfighter Decals]

I'll see what I can find out and post it hear. I got 4 of them and compaired them to ones i got direct from ADB to check to see if they were cheap copies, rejects, or Ebay finds. I didn't want to point any fingers until I asked around.

They do not look like cheap copies. They look like "rejects" more than anything else. Definatly not Ebay stuff. He had far to many of at least 30 skus- some I didn't know were available like the all metal Fed CA. The Fed CL/NCL looked a like the ones I got several years ago with partial dishes under the saucer. The Kz ships had severely bent engines and lots of flash. Same for the Gorn. The Free Trader and APT had crooked parts on them- not sure if it was poor casting or something else.

So i don't know if these are factory rejects leaking out the back door or somebody who bought a bunch of the rejects a few years ago selling them as "new". He is an Internet Retailer and had several other ADB, AD Asteria, and other games besides the Model Kits, "Action Figures", books, etc. He told me the name of the distributor he gets them from. I forgot it, but he wants my SFU decals real bad so I should hear back from him real soon and I'll ask again.

[Steve Cole]

We sell rejects at Origins for scrap metal prices to kit bashers. Maybe he got them from there, but I don't know anyone who bought more than a couple of dozen ships.

We've had metal CAs for several years now.