EDITORIAL
Good day, Ladies and Gentlemen,
The Chinese coronavirus has hit Europe,
and the world, and things are happening
that even a few weeks ago were not anticipated. I have no illusions about this
epidemic situation avoiding our industry, or our firm. The latest news describes waves of people in stores buying
everything in sight, and naturally, this
doesn’t include hobbyshops. It would
be nice, however, if modellers took the
hobbyshops by the same storm, in order to arm themselves with enough
kits and needs to overcome any supply problems, but I fear that modellers,
as a whole, are more than well stocked
with kits and supplies for years to come,
even without the fear of an epidemic.
On the other hand, it is true that,
even without COVID-19, that through the first two months of the year,
we reached our production capability
on a couple of fronts. At the moment,
under conditions of rapidly expanding
sales, deadline extensions had to be implemented, mostly in the Brassin line.
This manifested itself into our e-shop
as well, where the processing of orders
had to be delayed due to the shortage
of resin components. For all those that
are affected, I apologise. I am trying to
work out a solution to the problem, but
I fear that there is no quick fix to this
situation. Increasing production capacity is currently not an overly easy implementation in our country. But, we are
certain that a solution will be reached
and put into effect, much like last year
with kit production and decal printing.
Our customer support has also found
itself in a complicated position. Petra has gone on a long term leave and
won’t return before the end of March.
Customer support has been taken over
by two other ladies, Alena and Jana.
They are doing their best to maintain
the process, while implementing some
procedures to effectively deal with all
issues and requests of our customers.
And that’s not particularly easy. Truth
be told, it is often very difficult to come
to a solution to the full satisfaction of a
customer. In order to try and streamline
the communication process, we will be
putting up a form on our site. In order
to process a complaint, the form will
need to be carefully filled out, as well
as an inclusion of the problem description, and proof of purchase of the item in
question. In some cases, the customer
will be asked to turn to the retailer from
where the item was bought. There is an
increasing number of cases where cus4
eduard
tomers purchase a kit with damaged or
missing parts from, for example, E-bay,
and are asking us to replace them. We
are willing to do this, but we cannot offer it up for free, because we do not consider these issues from the side of the
modeller as our responsibility. After the
New Year, there was also an increase in
the frequency of complaints regarding
our decal sheets, in terms of missing or
censored swastikas. These sheets mostly come through German retailers, who
remove them in compliance with German laws. The removal has been done
with typical German precision, and not
only have they been removed from the
national markings of aircraft, which we
have probably grown somewhat accustomed to, but also from the kill markings
of Allied aircraft. An example of this is
the Mustang, where after its introduction, there was a spike in the returns of
decal sheets with removed swastikas. In
this case, unfortunately, the censorship
basically degrades the value of not just
the sheet, but of the entire package.
The blacking out of these swastikas
has also been performed on the boxart
and in the instructions. This is, in a way,
a pretty heroic endeavour, because the
number of these itty bitty, teeny weeny swastikas in each kit can go into the
dozens. We have gotten several emails
recently, that quite angrily question why
we would sell such distasteful censorship. Well, we don’t. This is not our initiative, and it’s implementation is not in
our hands. Unfortunately, it is also beyond our capability to limit this practice.
About the only thing we could do is to
issue a special version of the kit(s) for
Germany, which would include marking
options that carried no victory markings.
And I can’t help it, I just have to add that
them Germans would love that! For
now, about all we can do is recommend
all customers enquire about the state of
the product they are purchasing, especially from German sources, at the time
of their order. In every case such as this,
we will direct the customer back to the
retailer that sold them the item. We will
not be sending out replacement sheets
on their behalf. And as an aside, many
complaints point to the kits being shrinkwrapped, which is taken to be proof
of originality, but this is simply not the
case. We do NOT shrinkwrap our products, and this is another practice that
is out of our hands and in those of the
retailers.
Today’s new items are everything
except boring. This applies first and foremost to kits. It’s probably redundant
to note that Desert Babe is pretty much
sold out. This has been written about
for the last couple of weeks. I will just
add that this name has been applied to
the Limited Edition kit of the Tornado
GR.1 in 1:48th scale. The plastic originates from Revell, and the kit includes
our usual accessory bits. Photoetched,
masks and resin round out this tried and
true concept. The wheels and seats will
be in resin (Brassin) and the decals are of
our own production, and are very nice
indeed. The marking options are important, as they explain the name of the kit.
In Desert Babe, you will find eight marking options for the Tornado GR.1 from
Operation Desert Storm, the first Gulf
War. The British called this Operation
Granby. All of the marking options follow the pin-up girl theme. You may suggest that with this item, we are essentially beating a dead horse, that this has
been done so many times before. And
it has. But not like this, and I am convinced that we are offering what the modeller wants. In any case, there was a bit
over 2,000 of these put together, and
retailers have taken about 1800 of the
total. There were 212 left in our webstore at www.eduard.cz, and they are available from today, and if you want one
of these, be quick about it! There are
only fifty Overtrees available. Another
150 kits, built from reserve mouldings
of the plastic to cover potential returns,
will be issued in a special edition with
a poster and a pin. This special edition
will be made available around the middle of March on our e-shop, and will
be connected to a special event that will
INFO Eduard - March 2020