The story of how our 1st Funko Pop Exclusive came to be.

Funko Pops are a global phenomenon. If you aren’t familiar with them, they are basically small vinyl toys of mostly Pop Culture icons. From Darth Vader to Wonder Woman. Big Bird to Lion-O. Sheldon to Freddy Krueger. They cover EVERYTHING and some go for an insane amount of money as we will cover in a future article.

Back in 2013, my business partner and I decided to venture into something a bit different for our shop. We decided to commission our own Funko Pop Exclusive. This was an expensive and a long drawn out process but we had a good rep there at the time that took care of us. This was back when Funko relied heavily on small comic shops as they didn’t have all of their big accounts yet. Muuuuuuuuuch different world now...

Anyway, the order minimum was 2000 pieces which seemed like a tremendously large and daunting number to a small shop such as ourselves. We had been carrying Pops for a while by this point, a couple of years but it was still a relatively small part of our business. In hindsight I wish I had ordered more but I’ll get to that in a bit.

The process of picking what to do was fun. Initially our first Pop was going to be a Flocked Sonic the Hedgehog. Funko was releasing 3 pieces in the Sonic line. Sonic, Knuckles, and Tails. To use an already existing sculpt and just do some sort of variation on it was the more affordable way to go for us vs. the alternative which was to commission an entirely new sculpt. The Flocked option is basically a fuzzy layer covering the pop. A kind of fur coating for creatures or animals with fur. Sonic is an extremely popular character and crosses over into toys, comics, video ganes. We thought it was a no brainer. But Sega had other plans...

We were decently along in the process when we got word from our rep that Sega was unhappy with how the Sonic came out and would not be doing a second run on it nor any variants. Damn. Dream crushed. We were given the option to do flocked versions of Tails and/or Knuckles but we passed. We probably would have done it eventually if we had the Sonic but Sega’s decision to 86 that possibility soured us all together on the Sonic line. Back to square one.

We were really racking our brains trying to figure out what to do and then realized that Funko was doing a new wave of X-Men characters including Phoenix. The regular release of Phoenix was actually the Dark Phoenix in the Red Costume. We were told another vendor had requested to do an exclusive of her in the green costume. That would eventually become the Enerald City Comic Con exclusive which now fetches around $300. These were like $15 upon release. Just for reference the regular release which is now retired is bringing in around $100.

I liked the sculpt of Phoenix and thought it would be a good character to do...but what do we do? The green and red were already taken...hmmmmm. I got it!! White! In the Comics she rocks it for a short time but I got the idea off another collectible.

A few years prior in 2010, Kotobukiya released Phoenix in her white digs as part of the Bishoujo line of statues as a San Diego Comic Con exclusive. This piece is extremely popular with collectors as it currently fetched between $500-$750 bucks. Initially I think the cost was around $60 so not a bad return.

Either way...collectors liked White Phoenix. We told Funko. Showed some examples and boom. A new exclusive was born. Well technically 2 exclusives.

This idea came straight from my buddy Gary at Toy Matrix. A few months before I worked on my exclusive, he did one for Reverse Flash. What he did was genius and I completely ran with his idea. He took the edition size of 2000 and split it amongst 2 versions....a regular and a glow limited to 500. You can check out Gary’s awesome selection of merchandise at http://toymatrix.com/

We did the same and split our with 1500 regular and 500 glow. We initially sold the regular for $19.99 and the glow for $29.99 with a combo 2 pk for $44.99. As of today our White Phoenix sells for around the $175 range with the Glow White Phoenix fetching around the $450 range!!! The pieces were a giant success selling on our site at https://conquestcomics.com/ and the Funko community blew up from there. Who knew?!? I wish we did as we would have upped that edition size a bit.

Cool thing about the White Phoenix is in the mock up photos they sent us during production, it was yellow that was used. We requested Gold as that is what was on the Bishoujo piece and they told us it was too late. We were kinda bummed but no big deal. Well to our surprise when the pallets were delivered and we opened the first box it was gold!!!

Next time I’ll tell you about our other Funko Pop exclusive...the Metallic Harley Quinn.

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