Check out the new Wargames Foundry web site

The Wargames Foundry has been the place to go for historical miniatures for decades. But its web site has been a bit of a mess--until now. Check out the new and much improved Wargames Foundry web site!

Comments

[Foundry Arena]

We've been running Foundry since last June. Our plan was to wait at least six months before we made any major changes. We felt it would take that long to get to the bottom of everything. We can't really claim to have actually got to the bottom of quite everything yet. However, we have now started getting on with those changes!

Our Website
We have to put our hands up and admit to running a mediocre website: ugly, confusing and sometimes so slow it can make you want to weep uncontrollably with boredom and frustration. Our models look awful in the mean little photos.

The new site is now up, and we are working on further evelopments.

Embarassingly, someone chose to pointlessly change the names of many of our models without any reference to historical accuracy or common sense.

We can only offer our apologies, and our heartfelt thanks to all of you for sticking with us through the slow process of putting your orders together on our uncooperative website.

You may recall that our site was previously packed with historical information, articles, painting guides, banners, rules and suchlike jollyness. We will put all that back too. This may turn into a big job. I should be able to do much of the legwork but this may take a month or three.

We have also started removing Substandard and UnFoundrylike Models

From some point after 2005, a number of the new models made at Foundry were of either of a substandard quality or inappropriate in style.

Foundry started with a selection of mostly models by Michael and Alan Perry, and various odds and ends from Alistair Morrison and Dave Andrews. Since then Foundry has always stuck to a style that reflects the work of the early Citadel sculptors: Adams, Andrews, Ansell, Bibby, Goodwin, Morrison, Naismith and the Perrys.

Where a model obviously doesn't fit that style, we think that it really should be taken out of the Foundry ranges. We think that our customers have a right to expect us to maintain a consistent general style.

We have already removed the hundreds of packs of Napoleonic models that were made over the last seven years to replace Michael and Alan's ranges. We currently have no plans to put them back in production.

We will shortly start taking down all the models on our website that we regard as "UnFoundrylike".

We will continue to manufacture these models permanently, but will give them their own independent website with a new name. Until we sort a new website out we will put them up on eBay ("THE CASTING ROOM: Budget Wargames Miniatures!"). As they go up on eBay, we will remove them from our main website.

Substandard models are a more serious matter. There is no fun at all in selling models that are not adequate in proportion, finish, detail, pose or historical accuracy.

When we took over Foundry, we found ourselves in a painful situation. Customers were buying models from us that we considered to be substandard. This made us very uncomfortable: our instinct was to just discontinue them, we didn't want to push relatively poor models onto our customers. But we didn't want to be pushy newcomers who went about obstructing established customers buying choices either, or deny customers who have different tastes to us the chance to finish their armies.

In the end, we decided that we couldn't just discontinue ranges that people were still collecting and we stuck with our six month rule.

As it happens, when we looked at the sales figures, it turned out that although we manufacture a number of models that could be described as substandard, they make up only a tiny portion of our overall sales. Shortly we will permanently remove all those models from our site. We may offer them for outright sale (see below).

We have a vast fantasy range, and these are now to suport the new fantasy system God of Battles by Jake Thornton.

Foundry's last management reduced the price of our fantasy packs from £12 to £10 to try and get more sales in: but it made no difference.

We have done a proper costing of the earlier fantasy models.
It seems that for the big models which make up the bulk of the older fantasy ranges, we would have to charge closer to £20 a pack, just to break even.

More Recent Fantasy Models

Some of the new fantasy stuff made more recently between 2006 and 2012 is pretty good.
There's a lot of it, but it's a bit of a random mishmash. We are going to remove all of them from our website and put them up on eBay.
The new eBay site is called "FlytesofFantasy". We haven't put much up yet as we are waiting for eBay to go through their technical machinations to increase our selling allowance.

Unreleased Masters

Foundry's last management left us with surprisingly large numbers of masters of unreleased models. We keep finding more of them.

Some of the masters are rather sad: the underlying structure is fine, but the surface detail is quite poor.

The sculptor must have been taking the piss (as we say here in Nottinghamshire).
We plan to hang on to them and use them as training tools for new sculptors. Eventually they will probably be nicely sorted out and will see actual release.

Others will probably be manufactured and put up on the "FlytesofFantasy" eBay site.
We have some very eccentric Steam Punk Orks that we will most likely put into production eventually

Cheers

Marcus

https://www.facebook.com/Foundry.Minatures

https://www.facebook.com/FoundryArena