Or the fate of their GB line. For those who don’t know MR is now Factory Replicas. I e-mailed them to find out more info on the takeover. Here’s what they said. Just wanted to share.
Hi Mark,
Thank you for your email. We hope that we will be worthy successors to the Master Replicas customer; we are all fans and enthusiasts first and foremost and wanted to take Master Replicas back to its roots as an enthusiast run and led company.
Personally of late I felt that Master Replicas had become a bloated shell of it’s former self and had many far too many promises it later broke and had lead too many people into false hope. It had also started to produce products that lacked enthusiasm and passion and had become simply ‘another box’. Master Replicas greatest strength was always its enthusiastic fan base and loyal customers such as yourself deserve to be offered interesting, good quality affordable products on schedule.
We purchased the Master Replicas brand name, trademark and IP in May of this year. We did not buy the entire company and the purchase did not include any existing licenses, as unfortunately most licenses have a termination clause within them that covers change of ownership. This means we have to re-approach all the relevant licensors and make new proposals to them in the hopes of winning a new license on our own merit. We have closely evaluated all of Master Replica’s historic licenses and have made approaches to those brands that we think we can achieve our goals with, and those who are willing to work with us. Unfortunately the Master Replicas name is quite toxic to many within the industry due to the previous owner’s activities and although we are not the same company and have a totally different brand name it may take time to heal some of the old wounds that were caused. We have also had to face facts that Master Replicas may have had too many licenses to do them all justice and we would prefer to concentrate on smaller a core range of smaller licenses and do them well rather than trying to run before we can walk and take every single license out there.
To that end there are some licensors who will not work with us, and some we have chosen not to pursue, which I am sure will be picked up by other people within the business. We are also pursuing a lot of ‘new’ licenses that Master Replicas did not have in their stable.
The licensing business is quite slow and we are still in contract negotiations with a lot of people so I am afraid I cannot announce much in the way of fact. We don’t want to say anything before we have a signed and confirmed contract in our hands. I can tell you that we will be producing items from The Prisoner and James Bond and hope to be able to announce more very soon.
We hope to produce items that exceed the expectations of Master Replicas historic customers, both in terms of features, attention to detail and value for money. As well as prop replicas we will be producing some more affordably priced collectible items along a similar vein. At the current time we plan to produce all of our products under our Factory Entertainment and Factory Replicas brand names. We will for the time being be parking the Master Replicas brand identity in an attempt to restore its legacy and focus more attention on the good times and good products it produced and not so much on it’s shortcomings.
I would be interested to learn what kinds of products and licenses you would like to see. We also aim to be more open and communicative with our customers than Master Replicas had been and value any and all feedback.
I cannot promise to answer every email immediately, but I can promise that you will always get open and honest answers from us.
Thank you for your past loyalty to Master Replicas, I look forward to winning your loyalty in the future with new products.
Regards
Barry
Barry Eldridge
Factory Entertainment LLC