League Of Augsburg - Fighting Talk

Well, I got one of the 'circulars' from Foundry tonight talking about equalization of pricing for overseas customers. The mail is quite contrite and admits they have got it wrong.. and it appears they have also woken up to the fact that everyone thinks they are a basket case and have been for years. They are bringing old ranges back TYW and ECW. The mail used the word inexplicable in reference to the disappearance of some of their codes. A rather astonishing admission.
Have they sold out to someone else? Looks like new management and that somebody finally woke up to the fact that nobody really needed them any more and that other companies had left them in the dust. Might be that somebody just saved their bacon and they actually may get back to being somewhere approaching what they used to be 15-20 years ago.

Just received the same e-mail,certainly looks like a new broom is in the house!

I think that the wargaming world has left Foundry behind now though,most of their ranges being true 25mm and no longer matching what a lot of people are playing with.

Very interesting their comment about bringing back some of their discontinued ranges but also the packs from ranges they are still selling that they scrapped a few months ago, strange to say the least.

Also wonder if any new ranges will be of better quality than of late.

If that is to happen they will need to stop scaring all of their sculptors away. These blokes just start up on their own and take Foundry's business and Foundry use less talented people and issue products that no one wants.

Lets hope they follow through with this. One other thing they should do is scrap the entire range of the new Marlburians and go back to the older one until they can come up with a proper replacement for it. Awful, awful figures, the worst I've ever seen! There are ranges of fantasy orcs and ogres that look more human than these misshapen monstrosities.

Got the same email as the other guys, even if there is a new pair of hands at the helm they will have to make a massive Uturn to even remotely get back to their previous postion in the wargames market but the hobby has moved on so much since they were the leading company that they will never regain that position but at least it's good that they are finally doing something to change. Let's hope they drop their rediculous postage charges if you only want a pack of figures to finish off a unit/army.
Cheers
Dave

Paul:

PaulMc wrote: Awful, awful figures, the worst I've ever seen! There are ranges of fantasy orcs and ogres that look more human than these misshapen monstrosities.

Are you saying the Marlburians are even worse than the new Renaissance?

Probably a close one but I give the "Ugliest Dog of the Year" to their recent Condottieri range, myself, Marlburians runners-up.

Cheers,

Michael

Would be nice to see the GNW range to come back...cross fingers.

I did not recognize the name at the bottom of the mail 'Neil Littlewood' , here is some of the text and quite evocative, not the usual bland marketing mince...

While you may not have noticed yet, things are changing at Foundry and we are the middle of a process of restructuring and reorganisation. This will include bringing back some old ranges and reintrodcuing some old packs that were inexplicably removed from others. This will all take some time but we want to return to being the company we once were. As a symbol of this we have reintroduced the English Civil War and Thirty Years War ranges.


The two ranges specified are really one range but it was a great range for the time it was released. Maybe Greg if you lobby, they'll listen and bring back the GNW! Talk of symbolism is very emotional for a company so something big must have happened...

Probably a close one but I give the "Ugliest Dog of the Year" to their recent Condottieri range, myself, Marlburians runners-up.

Good point! I'd almost forgotten them. Man they really are stinkers.

I do hope they turn things around.

Matt the old manager has been asked to leave. The new guy in charge is Mr. Ansell's cousin. They have listened to and noted the unhappiness of many of their ex-customers and watched new 'sculptors' create the type of figures that no one would really buy, whilst the better, older stuff has been retired. New moulds are needed for many ranges and things that sell well / look good will be expanded.

I had experience of dealing with Matt(Fletcher?). It was not edifying.

Though I haven't had anything to do with him personally the tales I have heard of folks who had to do with young Ansell when he was directly in charge, over the years suggest the attitude issues may have started fairly early on & not just be the result of the last chap in charge. They did produce better figures though.

Ginger

Without wishing in any way to sound like Methuselah, I remember when you could go in to Foundry, pick up an ice cream tub and wander through their racks for as long as you liked picking out figures in ones and twos from across every range they had. If things weren't available they'd cast them up on the spot. I used to walk out of there with kilos of lead and did that pretty much every couple of months being a salesman on the road and always curiously having appointments around Nottingham You always had old Cliff moaning in yer ear about the price of cheese, England going to hell in a hand cart and his lumbago or something... but, it was nice.
When it went all industrial and they started thinking up weird and wonderful crap to sell it went downhill.. about the Guernsey phase i think.

I never did understand Darkest Africa despite the sculpts being done by the wonderful Mark C. A period about nothing to me, but there you go... I am a conventional kind of soul

Soon I'll be yearning for individually wrapped Spangles, penny mixes and black and white TV programmes. Whatever happened to the 20th century friends???

Like, I suspect, a few other forum members, I can still recall Bryan Ansell's infamous 'open letter' on an early mid 90's incarnation of the Foundry website when he claimed quality 28mm figures were being undervalued and the 1980's boom in 'cheap and nasty' 15mm ranges had ruined wargaming! I dread to think what the current crop of keyboard warriors on TMP would make of that statement now! (...the subtext to Ansell's rant was kind of - "all wargamers are ungrateful cheapskates"! )

I have to admit though - I wasn't entirely unsympathetic! I was something of a Foundry fan boy in those days, and I didn't mind paying Foundry prices as I thought the product was worth it (and back then I was pretty penniless so it's not like I didn't care about money). In better times I later became a Standing Order customer for several of their new ranges.

However, the relationship soured over the years. I was unimpressed when they introduced their 'FREE postage included in the price of the blister' policy, which had more than a whiff of price gouging by stealth about it. Then came the familiar Foundry game of 'hide the range' we all know as ranges were 'temporarily' withdrawn, or they disappeared completely to be replaced by versions from new in-house sculptors that in some cases were inferior to their predecessors.

For me the end came with a succession dire customer service incidents around 2000-2001, which included incomplete orders, over-charging, and the top prize going to a farcical and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to update them with the new expiry date on my credit card (for my standing orders). Four times I phoned them from Australia to Nottingham and gave them this information and four times I subsequently received an email a week or so later informing me that "...according to our records your credit card is now out of date. Please contact us to..." After the fourth attempt I just gave up! Never got the remaining blisters in my standing orders and Foundry never got my money - which is a shame as I would have been more than happy to give it to them.

I've not bought a Foundry product since, except for one visit in person in 2006 when I was met at the security door by a bloke with a phone glued to his ear who impatiently ushered me inside and then continued his phone call (which was clearly social and not work related) for more than 10 minutes before he finally had the grace to hang up and ask me if I needed any help. His side kick meanwhile had disappeared into the back of the factory the moment I walked through the door and never reemerged. I was then informed they were in the middle of a "major reorganisation" (although no one seemed to be doing any actual reorganising) and sure enough none of the blisters seemed to match the range headers displayed on the racks and a lot of stuff was just piled up on tables (I'd rung ahead the day before to say I was coming - but was not warned about any of this). Finding anything was a very drawn out and sometimes fruitless process and my 'sales assistant' was soon back on the phone again, leaving me to it. I'd gone with the intention of spending a couple of hundred pounds or more - I left with a book and about half a dozen blisters...

Sorry for the long story, but as you might be able to tell, it still hits a nerve. I LIKED Foundry - and I suppose I felt betrayed and disappointed. In retail there's nothing worse than wanting to give someone your hard earned cash only for them to be disinterested in taking it off you! Even so, I still have a soft spot for most of the old and some of the 'middle period' (immediately 'post-Perrys') ranges, so if there is a new broom sweeping through Foundry perhaps I'll buy again one day - but it will have to be one heck of a turn around.

DPT

Does this mean we can expect price decreases across the board as well?

When you pay the same for 6 Foundry that you do for 10 Copplestone, or half the price for the same number when buying Perry or Artizan, then there's a serious disincentive to purchase Foundry anywhere but ebay.