King of collectibles: how a Hong Kong toy maker turned his hobby into a global empire
Driven by long-time passion for realistic figures, Howard Chan has created global Hot Toys craze
Howard Chan loves toys. So much, in fact, that he spent all of his savings and a year of his life creating his first action figure.
At that time, about 14 years ago, Chan had just started a business making the kind of toys he had always wanted, starting with military figures.
The former designer and ex-TVB screenwriter once slept in a factory in Dongguan, China, for three days just to make sure that a walkie-talkie accessory for a fighter-pilot figure looked exactly the way he wanted it to.
The fighter pilot toy was completed in the year 2000 and it became the first action figure Chan sold.
“You know how those old walkie talkies had these twisted wires? We had to think of a way to make those wires look real,” Chan recalls.
“We ended up taking a huge spool of wire, dipping it in hot water to soften it, then a worker would take a needle and coil it by hand.”
This attention to detail and the realistic look of Chan's toys have been some of the keys to his success. Within a decade, he managed to turn his hobby from a two-person operation into a lucrative empire.
The company, Hot Toys, sells individual toys for as much as US$780 (HK $6,000). One of the original fighter pilot figures was sold on e-commerce website Ebay.com for US$285 (HK$2,200) in January - several times the original price.
Hot Toys started in Hong Kong in 2000 and now has fans worldwide, selling products in major markets like the United States and Japan. It is just one of several companies riding the trend of high-end toys for adults, or collectibles.
Chan, one of the earliest local players in the industry, says the collectibles market has grown to become a significant portion of the toy industry.
“We saw it as a trend: that if you can make something so detailed, you can sell it for so much money,” Chan says. “The collectibles market has gotten a lot bigger with a lot of companies involved, including film studios. That proves we were right.”
Hot Toys is known for its high-end, realistic figures that sell for around US $200 or more.
The company has the rights to make toys from most major Hollywood franchises, from Batman and Iron Man to Robocop and Back to the Future.
A model of The Bat (the plane from The Dark Knight Rises) is currently selling in the US for around US$780. Some less deep-pocketed buyers can sign up for monthly payment instalments of US$87.75.
That looks expensive, but it is considered a worthy investment. Some collectors have been able to resell their toys for double the amount they paid for them.
Even US companies are taking notice. Retail giant Toys 'R’ Us now has a separate “collectibles” section on their website.
Mattel, maker of Barbie and Hot Wheels, started mattycollector.com, which according to the description is dedicated to adult collectors whose “toy obsession is out of control”.
Chan's success did not come easy. After his company created the fighter pilot figurine, Chan believed he could create whole lines of toys based on US blockbusters. But he had to convince the Hollywood studios that a small company from Hong Kong was capable of making high-quality action figures for them.
“That was a huge hurdle. We were trying to get licenses through Hong Kong agents, and we said we wanted to make action figures. But the agents said, “What are action figures?”
Finally, by going through a Japanese agent, Hot Toys managed to buy the rights to make figurines from the Aliens vs. Predator franchise, and that led them to other lines like Robocop and Terminator.
Chan says these licensing deals still don’t come easily. Buying the rights to make Star Wars collectibles, for example, cost more than six figures in US dollars.
“It took half a year of negotiations before we got the licence,” Chan says. “The collectibles market is an important one and they were making sequels, so it took a very long time.”
Even though he is the head of a major toy manufacturer and has a team of designers, Chan still obsesses over the finer details of the toys, sometimes making last-minute changes to them.
“During our first announcement, we made a figure that wasn’t smiling,” Chan says. But Chan and his staff watched the film several times last summer and they thought Star-Lord, played by US comedian turned action star Chris Pratt, needed to be smirking as it suited his boyish, humorous character more.
“After the movie, we thought he’d be kind of flippant. The studios give us some stills [of Pratt in character], but you can’t really tell what the characters are like. So we changed the figure afterwards," Chan says.
Gary Lam Ka-yin, a local enthusiast, says that attention to detail is why he prizes Hot Toys products. The 42-year-old works in marketing and sets aside around HK$5,000 each month for action figures.
In 2009, Lam started the Hong Kong Figure Club for fellow enthusiasts. He says he has every single Iron Man figurine that Hot Toys has ever released.
“This company is a something Hong Kong can be proud of, so if they keep producing high-quality products without charging ridiculous prices that I can’t afford, I’ll keep buying them,” Lam says.
Lam says his flat is so full of action figures that he sometimes has to sell some of them before he can buy new ones.
He bought Hot Toys figures from the video game Biohazard for around HK$1,000 several years ago and says he recently sold them for HK$2,000.
Lam says he has one action figure he wold never sell - his most prized Iron Man figurine - even though it could fetch around HK$3,000, or almost three times the original price.
“The movies have expanded the figure market dramatically. Marvel and DC made a lot of great movies, so companies like Hot Toys have pushed the craze to unseen heights," he says.
Lam’s club now has more than 4,700 followers on Facebook, and they sometimes meet for dinners and barbecues. He says the members are more than 80 per cent male, though there have been more female collectors in recent years.
