In China, What Kind of Business Is a Figure With No IP Behind It?

Licensing an IP to make merchandise is still the default in the figure business; a figure that breaks away from IP faces an even narrower market.

In 2016, the Chinese anime-merchandise maker Hobbymax released a figure called "Saber Bride," modeled on Nero, who holds the Saber class in the popular Japanese game series Fate. It is made of PVC and ABS, at the standard 1/8 scale, about 24 centimeters tall overall. A model roughly the size of a grown man's palm, it sold for 795 yuan on the company's site; today it goes for as much as 2,526 yuan on Taobao.

Small, finely made, faithful to a popular anime character, and far dearer than an ordinary toy — bought only by devoted anime fans willing to pay a premium. That is what most people picture when they hear the word "figure."

There is another kind of figure. Take "Flying Beetle," released under Mojiang, a brand of Mana's Workshop, and designed by Japan's Koji Kamata. You would struggle to trace it back to any anime or game, because the character is Kamata's own.

Base included, the whole figure is no bigger than an 8-inch bowl. It is made of resin and priced at 2,480 yuan, in a limited run: the yellow-winged version pictured comes to only 150 units worldwide (figures are counted in units), and the green-winged version was likewise capped at 150. Both were sold only at this year's Shanghai Toy Show (STS) and at the figure convention Wonder Festival 2018 Shanghai (WF Shanghai from here on). On Taobao today it can fetch around 3,500 yuan.

The figure began in Japan. In the broadest sense, any model made out of the wish to turn a flat work into a solid object can be called a figure.

Break it down and Saber Bride belongs to the "PVC figure" category — the painted, finished pieces most people know. Manufacturers can control the cost and produce them in bulk, and most of what sells at anime-convention booths and sits in the windows of merchandise shops is this type. Broadly, figures also take in Nendoroids, gashapon capsule toys, food toys, and articulated dolls.

"Flying Beetle," by contrast, is a GK, or garage kit — a figure in the truest sense. Besides using a different material from PVC figures, GKs are far finer and far harder to make, and most come as unpainted white kits, leaving the buyer to sand, assemble, and paint them through a fiddly process. GKs are made in tiny numbers and cannot approach the scale of PVC figures. Pre-orders for a PVC figure can top 10,000 units, while a GK run is usually a few hundred pieces; one-of-a-kind pieces, or runs of a dozen or so worldwide, are common.

On price, both cost far more than an ordinary toy, and Mana's Workshop's "Flying Beetle" is plainly the more startling of the two. At Hobbymax, 795 yuan already counts as a high-end product — and it is roughly the average price of a figure today. For Mana's Workshop that is only mid-range; its higher pieces reach four or five thousand yuan, and some pass ten thousand.

Hajia, the wife of Hobbymax founder kiking, calls the latter "collector-grade GKs." Siji, who runs Mana's Workshop, positions work like "Flying Beetle" as a kind of art derivative.

Xue Qing (a pseudonym), 20 this year, is not a veteran collector. She started reading manga in sixth grade, but she has been buying figures for only a year — and has already put 70,000 to 80,000 yuan into the hobby, with a budget of nearly 10,000 yuan set aside for WF Shanghai, the convention's first outing in China. That is not a low level of spending among collectors, but there are people who spend far more.

"What they buy is more realistic — it probably isn't a figure anymore, it's a statue, and it's expensive. One can sell for 10,000 to 50,000 yuan, and the pricey ones go as high as 200,000," Xue Qing said. "They're not really in the same circle as those of us who are into anime."

She got in through a Pokémon Articuno GK, and she still mostly buys figures with an anime or game IP behind them, though she keeps an eye on ones with no existing IP at all. The most expensive figure she owns is an original design: "Qiuluan · Guanghan Palace," the piece sculptor Yuan Xingliang took first prize with in the third season of the Zaowu Prototype Creation Competition. It was limited to 300 units worldwide and pre-sold at 3,500 yuan; a version painted by a commissioned studio now fetches up to 12,000 yuan.

Mana's Workshop is the first studio on the Chinese mainland devoted to original sculptural work, and one of the country's best teams in high-end GK models. Founded in 2010, it has grown from four people to more than 30, of whom sculptors and technicians alone make up 80 percent; there is no department for marketing or publicity.

The figures it sells are mostly original characters, but it has not dropped anime and game merchandise altogether — the studio first made its name with figures for 《斗战神》 (Asura Online), a Tencent game. For business reasons Mana's Workshop keeps some licensed work, collaborating with games, animation, and film; those figures come to about a fifth of its output.

Mana's Workshop's GK models are known for their fineness, and most of their subjects come from myth and legend: the Luan Zhi Xiyou series, drawn from 《西游记》 (Journey to the West); the Meng Zhong Jing series, which renders divine beasts and spirits from around the world; and the Tian Suo Ming Luan series, on Buddhist themes. That distinctive, mysterious style is also why the films Big Fish & Begonia 《大鱼·海棠》, Dahufa 《大护法》, and Mojin: The Lost Legend 《寻龙诀》 all came to the studio to work with it.

From 2014 on, Mana's Workshop was invited to exhibit at Japan's WF figure convention, and it was then that the team met Japanese sculptors who make original work — the steampunk specialists Koji Kamata and Michihiro Matsuoka, and the up-and-coming sculptors Takashi Tsukada and Akiyoshi Ueda, among others. After signing them, Mana's Workshop set up Mojiang, a brand devoted to original sculptural work, which makes and sells only characters its sculptors design themselves.

Mojiang's figures are the "higher-end statues" Xue Qing was talking about. Its main pieces sell for 1,500 to 3,000 yuan, two to four times the price of an ordinary PVC figure, in runs held to 300 to 600 units.

Set aside prototype design, promotion, and operations. What does it cost just to make the molds for one figure?

By Hobbymax's account, a new figure needs 15 to 20-odd steel molds, each costing 30,000 to 40,000 yuan — so a full set alone comes to 450,000 to 800,000 yuan in development cost. At the average price of 700 yuan, a company that makes fewer than 1,000 units cannot even cover the molds; and because steel molds suit larger runs, an order has to reach 3,000 to 5,000 units to hold the figure's price at the average. Some high-end GKs use cheaper silicone molds, but those wear out fast and are all but single-use — the cost of a mold has to be booked against every one or few GKs it turns out.

However big the run, a figure can hardly reach a scale of tens of millions. That comes down to manufacturing. Casting the steel mold is only the first step: injection molding gradually corrodes the mold and dulls the figure's detail, so the mold has to be restored again and again during production, painstaking work.

Hajia explained: "Casting the steel mold is the most delicate part. A girl figure has a lot of fine detail — the tips of her hair, her fingertips — and those blunt easily when you make the mold. That's why so many toys look soft and rounded, with nothing sharp on them. Making a figure is really about supervision: mold restoration, injection restoration, paint restoration, checkpoint after checkpoint, with 80 percent of it done by hand. From the first design to the finished product takes about half a year, most of it spent supervising."

In its first years, Mana's Workshop ran into exactly this problem while looking for contract factories. Its GKs are so fine that mass production is hard, technical limits keep output from rising much, and the demands on workers' skill are high. "For an ordinary factory, our orders are small and the work is difficult," Siji said. "Either they don't want to take them, or their quality simply can't meet our standards."

The smaller the run, the higher the cost carried by each figure. For a brand that cannot lean on an existing IP's pull to sell, the market is narrower still than the figure world as a whole. A figure licensed with a character from 《魔卡少女樱》 (Cardcaptor Sakura) comes with a crowd of anime fans ready to buy it for the character alone.

"From the standpoint of what collectors like, if they don't recognize it" — meaning the character the figure depicts — "they may not be willing to pay for it," kiking said. "So we have to think about designing something good enough to be recognized, something collectors will pay for."

Siji says Mana's Workshop still cannot hold its development schedule and production costs to a tight line. But over the past year or two it has built its own factory and production line; annual revenue passes 10 million yuan, and the studio says it is now profitable.

Siji calls the buyers Mana's Workshop aims at the "new middle class." He does not deny that some of its collectors came over from the anime-figure crowd: "Those people are a bit different. They buy a figure because they like the anime, the film, the game — the same way you'd follow an idol."

"The so-called new middle class have real standards about the details of life, about aesthetics, about how they live. Buying one of these isn't about getting a toy to play with. To choose what I make, you first need taste of your own — you have to recognize and agree with my design, my sculpting, my subjects, my values. Second, you need a certain amount of money. As you've seen, it costs more than an ordinary figure."

That position is not the mainstream one. The domestic brand Hobbymax works the other side: developing anime merchandise, investing in popular IP to reproduce and mass-produce it, aimed at fans of anime and games.

Hobbymax can put out more than 50 products a year, spanning IP from anime to games to novels, Japanese and homegrown alike — 《全职高手》 (The King's Avatar), Warship Girls, Bilibili's 2233 Niang, Zhihu's Liu Kanshan. To cover as many spending levels as it can, Hobbymax splits its line into high, middle, and low tiers, from 30 to 800 yuan, and it has learned to control costs at scale. In 2017 its figure "Cardcaptor Sakura: Judge Yue" sold officially for 720 yuan and moved nearly 20,000 units.

Hobbymax's head, kiking, used to work as a sculptor at a Japanese figure maker. He came home to start a company and brought Japan's mature system for running the figure industry with him. The roughly 50-person team is split into five parts — planning, production, manufacturing, promotion, and distribution — and the company has a branch in Japan. Its sales channels cover 36 countries and regions, more than 70 Taobao stores, and more than 300 physical shops. In February this year it closed a Series A round worth tens of millions of yuan. And the company was only formally founded in October 2015.

It took Hobbymax under three years to reach that size.

Siji thinks China's figure market is entering a golden age, with an enthusiasm that resembles Japan's in the late 1980s and early 1990s. That was around the time Kaiyodo founded the WF figure convention in Japan, and when famous sculptors such as Takayuki Takeya, Kow Yokoyama, Takeshi Miyagawa, and Koji Kamata came up.

"We're just getting started. Compared with Japan, we're on the rising arc of the curve," Siji said.

Figures caught on in Japan from the 1960s, moving from models and food toys toward anime and manga characters, and by the 1980s an adult collecting boom had formed. Japan's figure market is now thoroughly mature: more than a hundred companies make anime merchandise, more than 20 of them leading players, with combined annual revenue approaching 6 billion yuan. But as Kaiyodo president Shuichi Miyawaki sees it, Japan's market has reached saturation, while China's is still enormous.

The Japanese sculptors Akiyoshi Ueda and Masato Ohata say Chinese companies were approaching their senior colleagues two or three years ago, asking them to design figures. The two got into the field themselves because those seniors had more Chinese orders than they could handle. Citing business confidentiality, neither would name their Chinese partners. Japan has felt the demand from the Chinese market ever since.

This year's WF figure convention, leaving Japan for China for the first time, was Kaiyodo testing the water. Good Smile Company, one of Japan's "big three" figure makers, announced this year that it is setting up a new company in Shanghai, Liangxiao Suomei, to develop figures based on Chinese works and characters; and the big three — Alter, GSC, and Max Factory — have jointly invested in a figure factory in China called Shenhua.

Masayoshi Konishi, CEO of GOOSEBUMPS, the Chinese organizer of WF Shanghai, said: "My own view is that about 80 percent of China's post-90s generation still identifies more with figures that carry an anime IP, and they'll go on liking those IPs — though not necessarily Japanese ones. They could be homegrown Chinese IP." But for someone like him, part of the post-80s generation that grew up inside anime culture, the appetite has changed: he has gradually taken an interest in finely made original figures.

Cover image: "Calyx," an original character figure by Mana's Workshop. Image from Mana's Workshop's official site