Here at Transformers At The Moon we are currently working on various projects including rebuilding this website, The Visisionaries.net, LuckyDrawTransformers.com, an archival project on UK Transformers prices, toy releases, store released, the "lead paint" story, TFNation event planning, the Visionaries coffee table book and several others. Well it pleases me that the first project is now ready to share and that is thanks to former head of Hasbro Europe's boys toys, Andy Couzens, we have been able to recreate their internal 1989 European Lineplan Development document that shows dropped, continuing and new items that came onto various European markets in 1989. The document has been recreated in full as a spreadsheet and will be added to if/when we have access to further documents.
The document includes the number of units ordered by UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland and distributors for each product in 1988 and 1989. From this you can tell which items were not onl available in each territory and their quantity but also it gives insight into how sales were going for the product based on whether it was to be dropped, decreased in number or increased.
It also shows how some some countries preferred certain items to others or were behind in product releases as was the case with G.I.Joe (Action Force) in France compared with the UK.
The numbers are believed to be in units of 1,000 though that is currently being tripled checked as it may be tens of thousands due to Andy's recollection that the minimum order was 5,000 units for one country as long as other countries also placed some orders.
Some items were released across Europe but were only intended for one or two markets where the demand was high enough. However if those markets could not fulfil the minimum order from Hasbro US themselves they had to bargin with other European divisions for them to also order n amount of the stock in order to reach the minimum requirement. This meant that some markets would order toys even though they had little demand for them but had increased demand for other types of toys. From what I'm told Spain historically was less interested in Transformers but more interested in dolls but they would often take orders in order for other countries to get the product they wanted on shelves.
The document covers some items from Transformers, G.I-Joe, Robotix as well as Pipeworks.
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