Chinese Influence on Market Prices

The posing abilities and appearance of body sculpts created by Angel of Dream and DBDoll (AoD being around for several years and DBDoll being fairly recent, though both are chinese) are frankly quite amazing things. They are better posing than Bobobie/ResinSoul (though they can pose amazing themselves with a little work). It is my Angel of Dream Min that people get surprised of him being chinese, because he poses better than my MiniFee ever did.

Chinese dolls are cheaper yes, but considering the cost of living in china is lower, the products themselves would be cheaper even with equal quality. Same with overheads, Bobobie do not require a translator, so their sales of dolls don't have to cover the pay of one, but Volks do. That is all I was getting at.

 

Look around you. Count the products you own that aren't made in China. Regardless of the brand, hardly anything is made in the US or Europe anymore. Assuming that the Korean or Chinese governments don't interfere with market forces, as the Korean standard of living improves, most of their doll manufacturing will move to other countries, probably China, to begin with. Who knows? At that point, maybe the Chinese will have their dolls made in (i.e.) Thailand.

(As an aside: has anyone heard of an Indian BJD? It seems about time.)

Can production costs be lowered in any other way? What about technical advances? Unfortunately, there is no Moores Law for injection molding (Moore's law predicts that every 18 months, computational power will double).

I am not a materials engineer, or any other kind, but I doubt there have have been many strides in injection molding in the last few decades. However, there are economies of scale; the die (that's the metal mold) wears out after so many uses and has to be replaced. The harder the metal the die is made of, the more parts you can get out of it, but the die costs much more to make. Still, in the long term, it pays off.

As the die starts to wear out, the parts have more and more imperfections. One way to make the die last longer is to use a softer resin, one that scratches more easily. Where labor is cheap, you can use human labor to sand or otherwise deal with some imperfections.

So the resin on cheaper dolls should tend to scratch more easily than for the more expensive dolls, and the parts from a long production run should acquire more defects as the die when it is used way past its intended life.

From a manufacturing point of view, it seems seems likely that Korean doll-makers, if allowed to, will have their dolls made in China, but for marketing reasons and profitability will keep their prices roughly the same for the same family of dolls. The only way to introduce a less expensive line of dolls is to make them smaller than the existing lines. Otherwise you sacrifice profits over quality. One alternative is going acrylic, where are no confusing expectations.

However, another trick is to create a quasi-independent company that is aimed at the lower-end market. It sells to people who can't afford the brand-name dolls, but gives good value for the money and even accepts a lower profit margin per doll. So whether Chinese or Korean, there should be dolls coming into the market at a moderate price, but with some trade-offs in quality. Unfortunately, I don't think the prices on our nearest and dearest are going to budge much.

Of course, none of this has anything to do with the Japanese doll market, which is a law unto itself.

~Ranma

 

The cheaper Chinese dolls have to be of the same quality as other countries to even begin to compete. Even then I don't see many people jumping onto it in that scenario either, since the stigma of Chinese products can color how people perceive what Chinese companies sell. Also, as other people have mentioned products cost more when cost of living is higher. China isn't on the same level in that respect with S. Korea and Japan.

Personally, my favorite bodies are from Spiritdoll. I also like Dikadoll, but both of these companies are more in the price point of other countries than the cheaper Bobobie doll you mentioned.

 

I might be way off base, but I'm pretty sure silicone molds are used for resin dollmaking which is poured rather than injected with force. The metal ones are often used in the construction of vinyl and other plastic dolls. So, er... the rest of this, about the softer resins and such wouldn't track under those circumstances from the reasoning applied here. I could be totally wrong, but I don't think so.