New Australian distributor

[RiZZa 41]

It seems Tamiya in Australia has a new distributor. Can only be a great thing for the brand as I can't say I heard anything good about the last one.

[Darat76 265]

I dealt with 1 person once with the previous importer, and it took that person close to 10 mins to figure out which shop they supplied placed the most orders for kit's and parts, which was after the 5 mins it took for me to explain why I was calling from an NZ number and that I had already called the NZ importer.

[matman 1499]

Yep , has been for a few months now .

[WillyChang 1814]

Why all so shy about naming names? 

Old mob was Toy Traders in Sydney, they've been doing T for about 40yrs (~1976 if memory serves). 

New guys since 1st Jan are SMS Southern Model Supplies in Adelaide. They also do Traxxas.

They supposedly brought "entire T range" to toyfair but TBH, it didn't really look like the full range on display. If it did, it's pretty sad... maybe they meant "full range of new stuff" then ok, fair enough. (T seems to be going cutesy cartoony on static war planes/truck models... weird.)

Have been hoping for improvement but in recent mths also have been chatting to LHS who've been on the blower with SMS - their T stock availability & ETAs are still anybody's guess  stuff just turns up when it turns up... gee whiz, can't be that hard can it?

Gave up waiting... same old, same old - don't hold your breath. 

 

[Snappy1 966]

I don't pretend to be in the know or have connections, but from my view the price of Tamiya in Australia has only gone up  since the new distributor and I haven't seen an increase in spare parts which is the most frustrating part, tbh I still get all my kits from Stella

[Darat76 265]

I didn't name any names as I couldn't remember the old one, and didn't know the name of the new one

just like I can't remember the name of the store I called, just that it was in sydney....

[WillyChang 1814]

3 hours ago, Snappy1 said:

I don't pretend to be in the know or have connections, but from my view the price of Tamiya in Australia has only gone up  since the new distributor and I haven't seen an increase in spare parts which is the most frustrating part, tbh I still get all my kits from Stella

well, yeah... except I haven't been able to even BUY anything in 2017 yet that's obviously been handled by the new guy, so I can't even compare 

But going by Traxxas stock, I used to play TRX and although some shops had walls of TRX bits it was never the bits I broke  their prices were triple that of US shops, and they were always a generation or 3 behind.

Tower, rcboys, Amain etc were my goto when we ran a fleet of Slashes. 

[Hibernaculum 933]

On 4/8/2017 at 11:48 PM, WillyChang said:

Why all so shy about naming names? 

Old mob was Toy Traders in Sydney, they've been doing T for about 40yrs (~1976 if memory serves). 

New guys since 1st Jan are SMS Southern Model Supplies in Adelaide. They also do Traxxas.

They supposedly brought "entire T range" to toyfair but TBH, it didn't really look like the full range on display. If it did, it's pretty sad... maybe they meant "full range of new stuff" then ok, fair enough. (T seems to be going cutesy cartoony on static war planes/truck models... weird.)

Have been hoping for improvement but in recent mths also have been chatting to LHS who've been on the blower with SMS - their T stock availability & ETAs are still anybody's guess  stuff just turns up when it turns up... gee whiz, can't be that hard can it?

  (Agreed)

FYI, Toy Traders distributed Tamiya in Australia from 1981 onwards.

Prior to that, Tamiya was distributed by a company known as Captain Quintron & His Flossy Unicorn Puppet Show. Though this was actually just an earlier alias that Ron (from Toy Traders) used during his glam-poodle era.

Another little-known-fact is that sometime in the early 1990s, Toy Traders became the world's first Fully Automated Retail Trader (FART). Ron would doze-off under a Playboy - waking occasionally to send an angry email or to reach for a cinammon scroll, but otherwise allowing his Tamiya products to "distribute themselves". 

One might assume that this automation would contribute to a decline of the Tamiya brand in Australia. But on the contrary - Tamiya now appears to be bigger here than it has ever been!!**

In an amusing epitaph, I just checked Toy Traders once-magnificent homepage. Launched in 2007 (15 years after single-page HTML websites went out of fashion), it was a single-page HTML website located at www.toytraders.com.au. Now, it redirects to the Waverly District Netball Association. So I can only assume the domain has been given away for free to the Netball treasury ladies in Waverly.

But if the new Tamiya distributor struggles, perhaps the real problem with Tamiya's retail supply chain is in fact...Tamiya? And their obliviousness to the needs and desires of their own customers outside Japan? Perhaps too much time spent designing craptastic cutesy cartoony cats attached to warplanes and trucks, and too few F's given about their once large window-shopper audience and once-near-ubiquitous reputation, in Australia (and the UK, and Germany, and New Zealand, and Norway, and... )? Ultimately, too few (zero) ways for actual customers around the world to actually contact Tamiya to offer actual feedback, tell them we love them, send them our money... oh well. It's not as if any other once-famous and ubiquitous toy brands have ever opened their doors to feedback, and ended up even more famous and ubiquitous... (oh wait, LEGO...)

So... who's up for Netball?  

H.

** With the aid of one or more of the following prescription hallucinogens: LSD (Lysergic acid diethylamide/Acid), DMT Psilocybin (Magic Mushrooms), Salvia Divinorum, DXM or Mescaline.