BJD as an Investment

Lulu, you're not just crazy, I could have sworn I saw a topic about this exact same thing once.

You MIGHT be able to turn a small profit with BJDs but since they age and fads change, it seems unlikely that a BJD will be as good an investment as something like oil or gold.

 

Since BJDs are cast replicas of an original not a ooak sculpt, the vast majority of the time they will stay the same or depreciate. Buying bjds as an investment is a huge gamble since only a select few will appreciate and that's only because the sculpt was limited and yet there was/is an extremely high demand for it. You never know which ones to choose either. I think Volks limiteds are the surest bet though as long as you yourself buy them new and not after market.

 

I looked for a thread before I posted, and couldn't find it.

 

See, I disagree. I am in my forties and have seen fads come and go, but quality always retains value. At any rate, I bought my two dolls because I like them, but I also chose two that I thought had timeless faces and who could be dressed in future clothing.

My thought is that would take about 100 years for real value to show, so it not like I am looking to retire. This is something for my nephews and nieces.

 

I'm not sure that's strictly applicable to BJD's as we know them. Most people tend to want the newest versions of a body or engineering system leaving the older ones to go for no money on the MP's here and while there will always be a small number of purist collectors who prefer the older varieties, the bulk of your prospective buyers will aim for the newer end of engineering. Look at the MNF's as an example, once Fairyland released the A lines, the MP's were flooded with DIRT cheap b line bodies as people naturally switched over and got rid of the old for far less than they paid.

Much like electronics, bodies especially fall from favour pretty quickly once a newer, better version is released and since that's the bulk of the expense of a BJD, it follows that the bulk of the value falls with that. There is also the fact that resin degrades over time in many ways and there are a large number of buyers for whom yellowing and minor ding damage is an instant turn off, and then there's the unstable nature of some companies resins that only become apparent over time. There's a myriad of things that knock value off them NOW, I suspect it's quite unlikely that these things'll go away the older the hobby gets, in fact, if anything, buyers have got MUCH pickier in the years I've been in this so going on that history, I can only imagine it would continue and get worse in the future as the sheer breadth of the selection available to buyers increases yet further.

I like to hold on to the fact that they're priceless in sentimental terms and that'll do me