Bye Bye - Floquil, Pollyscale, & Pactra

Now we're cooking with gas. We can whine all we want, and boycott and badmouth till we're blue but it won't make a difference. We're consumers, not industry insiders. I wonder if MR is getting the same politically correct PR form letter others have gotten?

 

Well, my email to testors was given a quick response stating that they couldn't get back to me immediately due to the high volume of emails being received. Maybe they may listen, maybe not.

Tru-color looks interesting tho!

 

I talked to two of our distributors today and they are both baffled. They commented that both the Pactra and RR paints sold as good as any line they carried. It certainly was canceled due to lack of sales. Maybe lack of profitability but according to the people selling it to our shop, they were high demand, constantly selling product lines.

 

I have a little background from past paint dealings with Testors and frankly, they were a difficult supplier and had a lot of quality problems, which why the company I worked for at the time took its business away from Testors and moved it to another supplier. Testors has always been a strange addition to the RPM brand stable, and compared to billion dollar brands like Rustoleum and big box staples like DAP, Varathane and Zinsser, it is just a tiny little part, maybe $80 million out of the almost $2.5 billion conglomerate. That said, RPM's Consumer brands are big box retail oriented, Rustoleum is a staple paint brand at all the big box stores, and I would guess that Testors is probably lining up with this focus. You may not be aware of this, but Testors products are carried by all the big box craft stores such as Hobby Lobby, Michaels, JoAnne Fabrics and such and Testors enamels are carried at Walmart. My guess is that this big box business is probably a huge chunk of their sales, maybe as much as 60-70%, and hobby stores are probably only 10-20% at the most anymore. I know our business was only a few percentage points of their sales, and they treated us like red headed stepchildren, so it wouldn't surprise me that the would kill off a small part of their business like model railroad paints. Makes their purchase of Floquil seem like kind of a stupid move, that's for sure. Since the model railroad colors are only carried at hobby stores, and are probably no more than a quarter of their hobby store paint business, its maybe only a few million dollars out of their total business and keeping a separate plant open for that amount of business may not make good business sense, especially for the solvent paint lines, which are a completely different formula than their other paints, so I suppose from a dollars and cents point of view, this move makes sense. But it sucks for us model railroaders, and it shows a complete lack of sensitivity to one of its customer bases, even if it is a smaller part of their business. And it probably fits with some other corporate goals they MAY also have. I don't know this for a fact, but it seems to me that Testors is moving away from the hobby business and more deeply into the arts and crafts business. Again, I don't know that this a stated business goal for them, but consider that their plastic model offering is painfully thin nowadays, maybe 60 kits of which half are already pre-painted, that they have a new tab on their website for "Creative Play, and that a big chunk of their business is coming from a&c stores, and they may simply be moving their focus to another, larger market. I don't think they will ever totally get out of the hobby business, its where they get their business reputation after all, but it wouldn't surprise me if they basically treated it as a cash cow and that more of their new product and development efforts will be aimed at products sold in these big box retailers. But where does all this biz analysis leave us model railroad guys, well... Well, it still sucks for us, no doubt about it. However, they still make an excellent brand of paint, the Model Master products, both the enamel and the Acryl products are both, ihmo, excellent model paint, both for brushing and spraying. Model Master Acryl is about as good as Polly S, maybe better in some ways, its just not in railroad colors. Possibly Testors could offer railroad colors in the Acryl line and/or Model Master lines, that would be OK in my opinion, or we may have to see what Acryl colors match model railroad colors and even do a little blending to get the exact shade we want. I have not tried the Modelflex or Valleho acrylic products, but Tamiya is also excellent model paint, not going away any time soon, just not in railroad colors again, and there is Gunze Sanyo, which many plastic modelers swear by. So there are options, but it still sucks that Testors is discontinuing the Floquil brands and Pactra brands. I am however, going to email them and ask them if they could give us matches in their Acryl line to the Polly S colors, and mixing ratios for Acryl products to duplicate the Polly S colors. Given Testors' lack of customer appreciation and sensitivity, I don't expect this to happen, but at least we can ask....

 

I assume that those decals were not selling well, at least in N scale. I've seen sets that were dropped in N but still available in HO. Model railroaders are a tiny enough market -- being in N scale makes you in a really teensy-tiny one.
MS has redone some of their sets and given them new numbers -- it's possible the decals that "went away" are now in different layouts and sets.

 

Don't know why anybody would be surprised at news like this.
Congress ignores the concerns and voices of 90% of the American people.
Capital investment firms buy totally viable companies to take them apart, sell the pieces, and pay themselves huge profits.
So a big industrial corporation dumping (for murky reasons) whole lines of merchandise with customer loyalty and steady sales is just normal business in the New America.

 

It makes sense for RPM to instruct them to come up with a business plan to get their products in the main stream retailers. It might even be dictated by the retailers, Wal-Mart is known for telling their suppliers what to make and how to price it. "We don't want to sell model paint, we want to sell craft paint, so either brand your paint like craft paint or we'll find someone who will" Obviously this is all speculative and a little conspiracy theoryish, but companies don't just shift their focus for no reason. Their new CreateFX brand is either an arm flailing attempt to stay afloat, or to comply with corporate or other instruction to come up with something to sell the arts & crafts people.

"CreateFX is a new product line that creates detail while educating, inspiring and driving innovation into schools, clubs, craft and hobby projects!"

We all know that the products in the CreateFX line are as old as dust and are pretty poor performers compared to other stuff, but unsuspecting scrapbookers don't know that yet. I'd put money down that the the basic Testors rack will be moved to the craft paint aisle as part of this shift to FX!!!!

 

I would think that,being in the decal business,NO product really sells "well" these days.Wouldn't the best indicator be that it's sold out? If I'm trying to order them,and I know others are trying to order them,and they're not available,instead of saying"tough luck",instead of doing their usual 250 sheets or so that would be their usual run,why not do less? Here's a company not willing to change their business practices to the changing times,instead of changing their production methods,they cut and burn.I used to buy 40 or more sheets a year,now I buy nothing from them,I gotta search hobby shop junk boxes..In effect,their business practices lost me as a customer,because they no longer produce anything I need..STUPID.If there's no market for decals,why keep producing new sets?

 

The above quote is the most true statement in this whole thread!

I rarely used anything except the the dio sol thinned floquil and a few scale coat products.
I feel all your pain about the changes ... I felt the same when the Studebaker was discontinued.

 

I, too, am saddened by Testors' decision to kill Floquil, Pactra and Polly Scale. However, suggestions about blending other manufacturers' paint to create the necessary colors is valid. At the same time, using another brand is also a good suggestion, but sourcing them can also be an issue, as some have pointed out.

Once, I decided to buy some Scalecoat II green paint for a planned project. The only place here in New Jersey that I knew carried it is The Model Railroad Shop in Piscataway, in Middlesex County - and I live about an hour north of there in Morris County. (It's bad enough having to travel so far when one has a car, but even farther without one.)

I sincerely hope other companies will step into the void and offer paints we modelers desire.

Dieter Zakas
Saddened, NJ

 

Order it DIRECTLY from Wearver Models. I have the same trouble NO LHS.So I have to order it. They have a minimum order amount or work the magic of TB and ask to see if anybody would be willing to sell a bottle to you. Just an Idea

 

TRU Color Paints

They are ready to STEP UP and FILL the void left by Testors, I talked to Rick@ Tru Color this am and they are ready to go. He said ALL of thier product it made is USA, always adding new colors, order directly from them if you do not have a LHS close. They are a little swamped with the back lash from Testors, but otherwise they are ready to go. I do Encourage you to support your LHS first, but if you are in my case with no LHS, then order from them. He said Caboose Hobbies/Denver CO and House of Trains/Omaha NE carries their FULL line he said, but that is a 5 hour drive one way to Denver and an 8 hour drive one way to Omaha NE for me so I have to order from them. I ordered some of thier product for a up coming painting project, will report back on how that worked out....Shawn

 

Well, then the recent deaths of major decal makers outside of N scale shouldn’t have been unexpected. Railtwister nailed it in stating that it was surprising that MicroScale has survived. So in the paint world, is it any wonder that more or less duplicating lines from the same manufacturer would be dumped?

Not necessarily. If a decal or a paint color took years to sell enough to break even, not only would today’s bean counters be against re-running it, but maybe the owner’s kids would be complaining about having three bean salad again. With only three beans. Every day.

Again per railtwister, hobby shops used to be the great reservoir of decals based on standing orders. That along with us decal hoarders. Decal makers were probably at or exceeded breakeven right off the bat. With suppliers like Horizon, not too long ago, shops were contractually obligated to order IIRC thousands of $$ every week (wholesale!); with decals a part of the picture to fill out the minimum. It was less of concern then in holding dead stock because the shop owner could sell it off to the next owner as inventory. Nowadays, who are you going to sell your shop to, much less sell your dead inventory for more than 10% of cost? In the older way, decal manufacturers probably wouldn’t know to re-run something to maintain supply because they wouldn’t expect re-orders for a year or two; just guessing they’d get re-orders and reprinting everything would be rather stupid. Consider a decal set where the scheme was later released RTR. Would you as a decal maker go head-to-head with that while the scheme was still largely available?

It’s more than 250 BTW. In any case, there is the cost of paying a (probably) union printer to clean up and set up the press for a new run. That cost plus equipment costs, shop space rental, spoiled and test prints on decal stock, etc. would dictate the minimum run needed to make money.

Ah, then, buy an old small press, and grab a derelict off the street to run it? Neither will give us the print quality we expect.

There is, but not apparently for what you want and not necessarily in the RR world. It’s the same for me. As an example, I wanted to do a few Frisco single sheath box cars, pre-1956. All that got me was money down the drain sent to a fraudster. So then it’s DIY.

It’s indeed a changing world out there. It always has been, but maybe not so fast as now. Grandpa would be on our cases for not carving our engines out of a solid block of wood, not winding our own motors and not doing the lettering by hand in enamel paint.

 

Not to pick nits, but you'd have to pay somebody to setup the press, union or not!

 

I disagree. With todays computer technology, it is perfectly possible for one to do small runs of decals and still make a profit. I have a friend of mine that does that here in the Seattle area. Although he does those rare decals that no one else will touch, he does them and still makes a little $$$$ at doing it.

 

Site says 250.

http://www.microscale.com/custom.htm

Jason

 

That's what I was just about to say.


Jason