Gunpla Building Community

I used to rely on that other site for news. It really is (was?) a great community, lots of folks keeping everyone else updated. P-Bandai will send out emails about new products, but for whatever reason the notification is delivered at 5pm the day after stuff went live. 🤬 So I check the site manually a few times a week. They used to do one drop a month, usually on the 3rd Thursday. But these days stuff goes up whenever. I try to post here when I see a new batch.

For new kits, Gundam.info is a good source. I also watch Kakarot197 on YT as he's very thorough and I enjoy his sense of humor.

Reprints are tricky. Bandai used to publish a reprint schedule listing out everything they were producing for a given month. (But they pulled the plug on that right around the same time that they clamped down on Japanese retailers selling to the US. They claimed it was to stop scalping, but I have a pet theory that gets way in the weeds. I'll put it below.) So the only source for upcoming reprints is what retailers have preorders up for. I've got a semi-local shop that puts all of their restocks up on FB or YT, and oftentimes that's the first place I'll see that kit X is back in circulation.

Pet theory that got way too long: Bandai is an official distributor in the US through Bluefin (who they bought outright). The exchange rate has been heavily skewed in favor of the US dollar for quite a while now. Bandai's US pricing doesn't reflect that: if something retails for ¥2500, the US price will be about $25. (Exchange rate as of today would be about $17.) So Bandai is basically pocketing the difference on each and every kit (and merch) sold through Bluefin/PB. Even at wholesale prices, that adds up very quickly. So they have quite the motivation to keep the domestic and overseas markets from mixing. And once things picked back up "after" Covid, there was a marked shift in distribution: Japanese retailers were frequently sold out while US stores were stocked to the brim. This includes P-Bandai US. We used to get select kits. Then we started getting everything new. And now we're getting a slice of every reprint, and things aren't selling out instantaneously. Bandai is making BANK on the US market right now. There are still Japanese retailers that sell to the US, but shipping costs obliterate any savings. Covid is a part of that. But my last shipment from HLJ, for example, hit me hard in the wallet (months worth of Private Warehouse purchases shipped all at once). That was summer 2019. And it's even worse now, with HLJ charging $20-30 shipping for a single HG. The old method of shipping in bulk to get a lower shipping cost per item doesn't work anymore. It sucks.