Why are some kits out of production?

[strobez]

So, I get that a bit of scarcity drives demand, so it behooves companies to build up a little tension by not always having everything in stock.  However, is many cases, it seems some kits go decades between reboxings.  Is there some good reason for that?

Most recently this occurred to me while looking for a boxing of a 1/144 DC-10-30.  The Airfix kit (according to Scalemates) hasn't seen the light of day since 2002 and the Revell kit was last boxed in 1999.  Since the companies don't make a dime off the secondary market, you'd think that they would want to rotate kits to which they already have molds out every 3-5 years or so... maybe with new decals.  But 16-20 years seems a bit much, no?

Now maybe that just isn't a popular enough kit, but my impresssion is that it's but one example.  In fact, I often feel like I'm on a hunt for buried treasure because the kit I'm currently after hasn't been seen in civilization for many years.

Assuming that once the molds are completed, churning out a few plastic kits is the easy part, I guess I'm just wondering why most companies don't seem to have anything like a regular release rotation?

Of course, the one exception to this seems to be Hasegawa.  They seem to be very good at packaging up their exisiting molds with news combos and limited edition decals.

[Thorvic]

Money - most kit producers don't actually manufacturer their own kits, so have to buy slots from commercial production facilities to do a production of their kits. that means a minimum run of approx. 1-5000 kits. It only becomes economical if you can sell enough to fund the production run and make a small profit, if those kits are unsold they then become useless stock on the shelves or are sold off cheap to get a small return. Hasegawa has a good relationship with its manufacturer so does lots of small re-issue which tend to sell out rather quickly (try looking for a current version of their F-111 kit !!)

Airfix had a different problem, when it was Humbrol/Heller the Heller Factory at Trun just churned out kits just to keep the factory running, this led to poor production quality as they just ran the tools to virtual destruction and flooding the market with kits that weren't actually selling that well, thus we had the mass clearance of kits in the noughties and the traumatic divorce from Heller and Toxic Trun.

Tooling's need to be treated kindly and maintained or they start to wear out or break (think of the flash infested ex-frog kits churned out by eastern Europe or the Airfix kits in Humbrol days), the eastern Czech manufacturers tend to do limited production kits, which are cheaper tooling's using softer metals that have a short usage quota and wear out. Special Hobby are currently redoing some of their back catalogue by retooling some of its popular kits as the old tools are long gone.

[Hobbes]

Yep. In addition, you don't want too many different kits in stock at the same time: you get a fixed amount of display space in many stores, so you can either display n kits prominently or n*2 kits badly with half of them out of sight.

Airfix has basically decided to stop reissuing many of their old kits as the quality of the kits and the moulds isn't too good these days.

For some kits, demand just drops to a level where production is not sustainable. With the DC-10 long out of production and out of service, the interest isn't there any more. 

[PR19_Kit]

Re-doing them with different decals isn't as easy as it sounds either, many airlines having jumped on the licencing bandwagon and demand massive fees for the 'privilege' of the manufacturers and we modellers giving them free advertising. (think about it....)

That's why the Airfix DC9 only ever had the same set of decals even after having been re-done twice. And it's why you hardly ever see models done in UPS markings.

(But I have a full set of 1/144 UPS decals......  )