M4E #20: Gunpla Factory
Today we are going to delight ourselves with kind of a geeky manufacturing process. Probably, you all know Bandai, the japanese toy manufacturer. One of the main incomes of the company comes from intellectual property rights related to the Gundam anime. They represent more than 10% of Bandai Namco sales (about US$783 million in 2021). More specifically, a great amount of this income (about US$340 million) comes from the toy segment of the franchise, specially from gunplas (Gundam Plastic models). In the following promotional video from Bandai a tour through the whole process in the Sizuoka factory is showed. Sit and enjoy the ride!
Time for Insights
When the original TV series ended in 1980 its audience figures were not specially good. However, Bandai bought the rights to release toys from the show and it started to manufacture plastic model kits that required glue and painting, something not common in the toy market in Japan at the moment. Due to its low price and novelty, Gundam’s popularity skyrocketed, creating a whole empire with more than 50 TV series and movies, videogames, clothes, toys and, of course, gunplas.
In the video you can see the first steps of the product lifecycle: 1) 3D design of each piece and how it fits with other one, 2) the adjusting process for the metal molds that will generate the plastic model runners, 3) the plastic injection molding manufacturing process and 4) the logistics that transport the runners to include them in each model kit.
Every plastic model kit wether it is a gunpla or other thing like a plane has one problem: the quantity of leftover plastic runners is quite important. Thus, Bandai started last year an initiative in Japan so fans could recycle them so they could manufacture more models coming from disposed runners.