Proper Model Making - a rant against the decline of good model shops

[OSHIROmodels]

Model Zone was bought by WH Smith, although they seem to have abandoned it now. There was a section tucked away at the back of the shop in Sauchiehall St in Glasgow for a few years, but there was less and less stuff every time I was there. The last time I was in it had completely gone.

They could have done something with the brand, but the selection of stuff was odd - enamel sprays rather than acrylic, fully built models etc. It was as if someone at head office had bought Model Zone to fulfill a childhood dream of owning their own toy shop but then got bored with it

Yeah, complete shame what happened. There was a small selection in ours for a while and I would buy as much as I could there (which wasn't a lot unfortunately given the selection) and at one point there was a young lad working just in the model section but was like a member of GW, instant put off I'm afraid 

[Jabba]

We are quite lucky with Norwich, also several gaming groups in and around Norfolk in general.

Tony.

[mcfonz]

Nice to know there are more Norwich/Norfolk gamers on here!

I plan to go to Aftermath this week. After stepping down from my chairman and playing for a footy team I have the time again to commit to a club.

Tony - I know of your club through a chap I know who butchers plastic kits and is bloody good at it! 

I really should introduce myself to more people at Diceni - you guys had a table there didn't you?

Forgot to say:
The Games Room; Stocks RPGs and miniatures to support them. I haven't been in there in a while but he stocks Miniature Paints when I went last time he had Warmachine and some boardgames as well.

Langley's; upstairs, has an extensive stock of model kits (airfix, revell etc) and stocks a range of the Perry and Warlord miniatures, plus Vellejo and model paints. Possibly Mantic but I can't remember for sure. Plus the styrene strips and brass rods etc. They also stock train set accessories so trees and flock. Probably the best all round shop for your traditional wargming stuff. Also upstairs in Langley's is their boardgame section which is also pretty large, if you are into other tabletop stuff as well.

Kerrison's; upstairs again, theme here! Has stock of some model kits of the airfix and revell variety and supporting paints for them (revell I think). They are quite open to stocking new stuff if there is enough demand for it but at the moment have quite a range of GW and can order stuff in if needed and some Wild West Exodus.

The Games Table; It's on Magdelen Street / Anglia Square. I can't say I know much about it as it has only just opened. I do know they were offering deals on the new AoS so I think it's safe to say they stock GW stuff. Otherwise I need to visit to find out more. I get the impression that they have boardgames as well.

Athena Games; very much your quintessential all round tabletop gamer store. Loads of boardgames, ccg's, tablespace etc. They frequently run tournaments for wargames and tabletop games like X-Wing. They stock GW, Mantic and Warlord as well as some Knight Models stuff - possibly more.

I also forgot to mention Zatu before, located out of the city itself in Taverham and very much more of a tabletop game supplier in that they are less wargaming and much more about other tabletop games. I think they might stock Dust. Not been there either.

[Jabba]

Tony - I know of your club through a chap I know who butchers plastic kits and is bloody good at it! 

I really should introduce myself to more people at Diceni - you guys had a table there didn't you?

Ah Von Mesmer as we call him, yes he has turned into a bit of a plastic wrangler.

Yep we do tend to have a table at Diceni, participation games at the last two. Ronin this year and Wings of Glory at the previous. Demo games in years prior to that I believe.

Langleys still has some Victrix last time I was in. Not sure they are restocking though.

Games Room has various Star Wars and Star Trek ship games and also some Wings and Sails of Glory stuff too. Great little shop.

Athena also has Flames of War and Team Yankee stock.

[mcfonz]

Ahah! Well I was in front of you with my sci fi table representing Random Platypus!

I guess we are pretty lucky in Norfolk!!!!! 

[Lysandros]

Nice to know there are more Norwich/Norfolk gamers on here!

I plan to go to Aftermath this week. After stepping down from my chairman and playing for a footy team I have the time again to commit to a club.

Tony - I know of your club through a chap I know who butchers plastic kits and is bloody good at it! 

I really should introduce myself to more people at Diceni - you guys had a table there didn't you?

Forgot to say:
The Games Room; Stocks RPGs and miniatures to support them. I haven't been in there in a while but he stocks Miniature Paints when I went last time he had Warmachine and some boardgames as well.

Langley's; upstairs, has an extensive stock of model kits (airfix, revell etc) and stocks a range of the Perry and Warlord miniatures, plus Vellejo and model paints. Possibly Mantic but I can't remember for sure. Plus the styrene strips and brass rods etc. They also stock train set accessories so trees and flock. Probably the best all round shop for your traditional wargming stuff. Also upstairs in Langley's is their boardgame section which is also pretty large, if you are into other tabletop stuff as well.

Kerrison's; upstairs again, theme here! Has stock of some model kits of the airfix and revell variety and supporting paints for them (revell I think). They are quite open to stocking new stuff if there is enough demand for it but at the moment have quite a range of GW and can order stuff in if needed and some Wild West Exodus.

The Games Table; It's on Magdelen Street / Anglia Square. I can't say I know much about it as it has only just opened. I do know they were offering deals on the new AoS so I think it's safe to say they stock GW stuff. Otherwise I need to visit to find out more. I get the impression that they have boardgames as well.

Athena Games; very much your quintessential all round tabletop gamer store. Loads of boardgames, ccg's, tablespace etc. They frequently run tournaments for wargames and tabletop games like X-Wing. They stock GW, Mantic and Warlord as well as some Knight Models stuff - possibly more.

I also forgot to mention Zatu before, located out of the city itself in Taverham and very much more of a tabletop game supplier in that they are less wargaming and much more about other tabletop games. I think they might stock Dust. Not been there either.

I have a farm near Halesworth, Southwold inland in rural Suffolk.  We as a family go to Norwich once a month . It's a amazing City , beautiful without being a museum, Bohemian in the St Andrews district, all classes of people  use the centre , full of life .
As we get no passing traffic , Norwich has developed a culture rather different from the rest of Britain in a good way.

[Captain Blood]

Norwich has developed a culture rather different from the rest of Britain in a good way.

It's the Angles 

I like Norwich too, although I'm not a regular visitor.

When I was a lad in the early 80s, I worked part-time at Beatties (which was the predecessor chain to Model Zone). That too went tits up after many successful years. Many of the 30 or so large Beatties stores re-emerged as Model Zone stores.
Both ill-fated chains suffered from the same problems which probably demonstrate that a big chain of model shops in prime locations is ultimately not a sustainable proposition. (Even GW have closed many stores, or relocated them away from the prime high street / shopping centre locations).

My observations from Beatties and Model Zone down the years:

- The margins and volumes are just not high enough on plastic kits, models and related materials to warrant ever-spiralling rents in prime high street locations or flashy malls...
- Added to which, many of the stores were BIG. Not dark and pokey little model shops, but very sizeable retail units.
- Ever increasing competition from online sales, obviously.
- Carrying too much niche stock and too much variety of stock and lines. And overstock. Great for kit-builders, but not sustainable to fill the shelves with obscure kits from unheard of Far Eastern manufacturers... A kit that might sit unsold on the shelf for 5 years. It's not a viable basis for retail which relies on fast throughput of stock.
- Confused merchandising and often a cluttered, generally untidy and disorganised display. Kind of unavoidable with any model shop, with such a huge variety of different products in all shapes and sizes and states of packaging. But always looks messy and hard to find what you want...
- Randomly branching out into cuddly toys, space hoppers, water pistols, kids' games and assorted non-modelling products with the aim of trying to recoup some money fast - thereby making the in-store environment even more messy, confused and off-putting to their core target market - modellers...
- When I worked at Beatties (and I'm sure it was the same at Model Zone), the most valuable lines were not plastic kits: it was model railways. But unfortunately, whereas they were always overstocked with plastic kits, they never carried complete ranges of high value model railway rolling stock - and none of the staff (including me) knew anything about model railways! So model railway enthusiasts tended to go elsewhere for their fix.

Online is the unavoidable future I think...

[Daeothar]

Online is the unavoidable future I think...

I tend to agree.

We used to have an absolutely wonderful shop here in Breda, the Netherlands, called Bliek. It began as a pure model train store, but as the son gradually took over from the father, the offerings became much more diverse, starting with plastic model kits. So many model kits.

At their high point, they had a full wall, floor to ceiling filled with shelves full of model kits of all sorts and kinds. Different scales, subjects etc. It must have been about 4 by 15m, jam packed with kits...

Then, oh joy, they branched out into miniature wargaming. that was at least 90% GW, but as at the time there was not one GW store in the Netherlands, there was much rejoicing. later on, there were other lines as well; Confrontation, Warzone and near the end, Warmachine.

For years, it was a h(e)aven for model enthousiasts and wargamers alike; it was a regional landmark. But they suffered from the same issues as other shops; not enough turn over from their exisitng stock, so they branched out into remote controled cars, ready made models, even kites and the like!

The appeal of selling one high end remote controlled car to some chav (or Dutch equivalent thereof) was obvious, next to selling a couple of blisters to a wargamer. Even when that car was a one-off sale, and the wargamer would be coming in every week.

Eventually, the owner, who really did not get the wargaming market, got into trouble with GW for not making his payments in time, which resulted in them only supplying when he did pay, meaning that he could not sell, because the items that were in demand he could not get; a vicious circle. Then, he came into conflict with the GW Outrider running the store's club over some very small issues that got blown out of proportion, and the entire club was shut down.

Not much later, the store closed; they tried to sell off as much of the stock as possible at reduced prices, and even then the man was bitter about us wargamers all of a sudden spending money on heavily discounted items, which had been lying on shelves for many years.

Now, when they were still open, I heard from a club member, who had also been a part-time store employee that about a year or so before the store closed, they had been ordered to clear out the attic of the shop. It had been jampacked with plastic model kits, accumulated over the years, making place for newer kits on the store shelves.

And they had to throw them all into a huge bin/dumpster. he told me they had to jump up and down on the huge pile of kits in the bin, just to get it closed again. We're talking about 3 cubic meters of compacted model kits, all thrown out!

I asked the store owner about this, and he confirmed it, saying they would not sell anyway and were just taking up room. I told him I would gladly have eBayed them off for him, for 25% of the profits; he would have made a killing, but he just couldn't see that working, and wouldn't have agreed anyway.

With such a business acumen, it's no wonder they went under.

Then, about 6 months later or so, right across the street, another model train store opened; Trein2000. Its focus was trains, but they also had a quite spacious model kit section in the back, plus all the tools, paints, glues etc we as wargamers also require. So for quite some years, that was the place to go to for supplies, it being the sole shop of its kind in the entire city.

But again, this owner did not want to have anything to do with wargamers, and the man was often downright rude once he found out what my background was (even though the other staff were always friendly and helpful).

And this store closed down some years ago as well; model train sales have apparently been slowing down for years already, and us modelers and wargamers simply did not spend enough to keep them afloat. Also, the huge amount of model trains on display in the store must have cost a fortune; all of them jsut money sitting still.

Interestingly enough though, after his breakdown years before, the owner of the original store across the street bought it, and revived it as a high end toy store, with a modeling and even wargaming section, under his old name; Bliek.

We, as local wargamers were elated, but soon, there were management issues again, they had a problem with one staff member skimming the model and wargaming section heavily, and eventually the decision seems to have been made to just let the section die off. Slowly the stock, not being renewed, is being replaced by Lego (he used to have a dedicated Lego store in the same street as well, but it closed and was largely moved into the back of the current store).

And since the only reason for the last couple of years to go in was to get my Vallejo paints and sundry modeling supplies anyway, all incentive to do so is now gone, and I'm forced to do all my buying online or when I sporadically find myself in another city.

whenever I am elsewhere, I immediately check if they have model stores, so I can stop by there for my occasional fix. Oh, and Crisis of course; my yearly pilgrimage to Antwerp to spend hobby funds on little stuff...

So yeah; the (war)gaming store landscape here in the Netherlands, whilst never abundant, is slowly becoming more desert-like by the year...

[N.C.S.E]

I must echo you there, I was quite surprised when I was in Amsterdam in 2015 to find how desolate the hobby scene was. Boardgames was the closest to the hobby one could get!

I'll admit however that I have found every shop that I have met in a wargames focused shop (not that many to be sure) to be... difficult... to get along with, ranging from grating to actively saying: "don't get into that scale for such and such a game" when I know well that that scale is well regarded and popular - not the most to be sure - but popular.

The loud heavy metal (not my cup of tea) playing in these some stores doesn't help

[TWD]

The gaming and modelling community of Norwich are so proud and happy about their local hobby resources that they give one another a celebratory 'high six' whenever they meet.
 

[Mindenbrush]

Here in Montreal we have a number of model/gaming stores.
Local to me is Ted's Hobbies and Hobby Junction, both have plastic kits, paints, scratchbuilding supplies. Ted's has recently ventured into GW and has a gaming area.
Downtown we have UDISCO which is a massive warehouse store for models and supplies, one could spend the whole day in there and not see it all.
A group of us meet in L'Abyss downtown which has a massive gaming area, tends to do more fantasy than historical but does have SAGA and FOW.
There are a few more scattered around the Montreal area so overall they are not doing too badly.
Biggest problem is that they cannot stock what everyone is looking for so online buying will take a percentage of sales.

[smirnoff]

Stroud has Antics (useful for strip plastic/balsa etc), Atlantic games (independent) mostly fantasy, and then, on Saturdays, Shaun Mutton has his Stall of Wargaming Delights in the Shambles at Stroud Market, he even runs games which, if you can hack your way through the hordes of ankle biters, you can join in.
Spoilt, innus....

[Wyrmalla]

Oddly when travelling I've found that outside of the city where I live, its the smaller towns which seem to have livelier modelling scenes than the larger cities.

Maybe its real estate prices, but here in Glasgow at least, many of the model and craft stores tend to be in the less expensive areas anyway. In Glasgow off the top of my head there's maybe six model shops. None of them are particularly large, and I feel like some of them are getting smaller - in the way that they're pushing out the traditional stock for newer systems (the "wargaming shop" has wound up investing more into roleplaying games, and now toys; which I'm lead to believe account for the majority of their sales).

Contrast Glasgow with Edinburgh though and its night and day. Despite being the capital, or maybe because of that, there's barely any model or craft shops of note there. Though oddly loads of roleplaying and boardgame shops. Those that there are are on this weird spectrum of being barely model shops and megastores. Its like the one model shop just became so large that nobody wants to compete. Which is sad then that they too are chasing the money and doing away with the smaller scale kits ("no money in them").

Out in the country its a different matter. Whilst you'll never find most of them on Google Maps, I've found tonnes of small shops out tucked away on the back roads. Likely hold overs from other times when there wasn't the distraction of video games for the kids. But they're still out there, and seem to carry modern enough stock (though when miniatures magazines are doing reviews of 30 year old kits, that's maybe not the best term). Though so many have closed down too.

Its the ones in cities which seem like they're more fleeting. Perhaps in that the ones that are there have become institutions. Where they only close down due to the retirement of their owners (that's the main reason for closures in Glasgow).The newer ones don't tend to last more than a year or two, which I'm guessing is down to them being less stubborn than the old guard. The lasting stores are aware that its a crap market to get into, but carry on (just like the old yins who turn up to the flea market week on week, despite dwindling sales, just for the company and consistency).

Unless they're a cultural shift, the highstreet's dying. Its not just model shops, its everyone who's going through this. Though perhaps the miniatures stores are effected in different ways to say clothes shops of course. As I heard a former manager say recently, "when a customer can buy a product and have same or next day delivery, the highstreet just can't compete". I'd say the highstreet used to have the convenience option over online, but those delivery times are killing even that.

Which brings the model shop's appeal down to things like the customer's force of habit, or the "feel" that they offer. Personally I love going to a shop that I've never been to and spending ages trawling through their bits to find stuff I'd have never known about if I was just searching the internet (or are long out of production). Similarly, outside of wargaming clubs and miniatures shows, they're likely one of the scant places you can find where you can talk about the hobby (though as a wargamer, most model shops turn their nose up at me...).

We'll have to see how things are in 20 or 50 years. Right now we still have hobbyists who know the experience of going to a shop. Give it a few decades and maybe people will stop seeing that appeal. There may be a resurgance as people look for nostalgia, but I don't see model shops having a product which will ever make them an alternative to the internet for those newer consumers. Though if the hobby were to dwindle in those years perhaps it wouldn't be a question of what could save those shops, as the lack of a market would already have killed them off.

Still, with 3D printing and a rise in "makers" its hardly like model making would die in the future. People will still want the experience of cutting things off a sprue and kitbashing (its what the modern props world is made from). It may be though that instead of going to shops the future modeller's going to just pull files from the internet and have them printed off, even just buckets of random parts if they want the kitbashing experience. Discussion's gone to forums and sites like Discord now, and with people spending more time on the internet, that could supplant going to a local model shop or club just to have a chat about our toy soldiers.

The hobby as a whole won't die, however I'm thinking that things may move towards these "maker spaces", rather than the highstreet. Its a concept which seems to have grown (especially in America) and adopted model making, among other hobbies, as one of its contents. So there may be a rise in hobbyists who comes from that environment to give the hobby a bit of a boost in future (not to say it necessarily needs it). Nor would there ever be a world where model making ever dies out. The model shop however, along with the rest of the highstreet, may become a thing of the past - relegated to one old shop hanging on in some back alley, or a nostalgia baiting place which doesn't quite get it. These are probably wider concepts than just one type of shop dying off though, with wider economic and cultural questions which will come into play. Who knows, maybe the internet will just go out one day and we'll all be living in a Shadowrun like future where we're visiting model shops between shoot outs with the local Doom Cults...


(someone on this forum really needs to tell me off for accidentally writing such long posts at some point  )

[N.C.S.E]

Haven't heard of maker spaces in relation to the hobby down here in Austr(al)ia, but I can see creating scale models in such a space could be tremendously rewarding.

[Daeothar]

My thoughts on the newer stores not making it past a couple of years, while the older ones seem to endure, are that buildings the older shops are in are often owned by the shop-owners, and have usually been completely paid off year ago.

So they have little to no costs for the shop in itself, especially if they live on the upper floors of said store! There are many, many examples of such places here in the Netherlands; old shops that have been there forever, often in prime locations, enduring while younger shops around them open and close within a few short years.

They don't even have to generate all that much sales either; just enough for them to eat and occasionally buy some new stock.

I've known a shop, owned by an older couple, that sold electrical gardening tools. Well, sold; they had the shop filled with old machines that had been there for ages, all discolored from exposure to sunlight etc, so it was clear what business they were in, but all the traffic in the shop was from people coming in to collect their parcels, as it was also a postal service collection point.

Most of the day, they were just upstairs in their living room, doing their old people things, and only came (slowly) down into the shop when they heard the door bell ringing. I picked up many a parcel there, and always marveled about how they managed to stay afloat. But that's it; they owned this piece of prime real-estate, and probably paid next to nothing for their mortgage, if anything at all.

And all the while, the newer shops in the same street have to pay hugely inflated rent that so eats into their revenue, that they would always struggle to stay afloat, even if they were doing well...


+++EDIT+++ And I just found out that the only model shop in Breda (Bliek) aside form the tiny local GW (which, admittedly, we still do have), has closed as well. I had feared as much, but had not expected it to go dodo this quickly...