English Good Smile site launched
I already posted on Twitter about this, and you've probably seen it all over the place, but what the heck. Danny Choo has been working with Good Smile to develop an English version of their site. It's a bit simpler than the current Japanese site, but it does have plenty of very nice high quality images of their current and future offerings.
I do have to wonder how much difference this will make though. I don't want to say that Good Smile isn't doing something good here, and I hope maybe we'll see more figure companies doing more to reach out to all of us non-Japanese folks who buy their figures. But in all honesty, right now there isn't much outside of big images that can't already be found by following one or two figure blogs. What I'd really like to see is for Good Smile to open up direct overseas purchasing. Maybe they're trying to keep funneling sales through their licensed distributors, like AAA Anime, which is understandable, but there are always things that don't make their way over -- most notably when they occasionally do limited edition orders through their website. For example, when they released the limited edition cosplay Konata figma at Wonder Festival, shortly afterwards they had limited orders up through their site for the figure. In order to buy that, I had to go through a proxy service which ended up costing me more than double the actual cost of the figure! Seriously, if they were to let overseas customers place orders for items like that directly through this new site, that would really put them out front of their competition.
I do have to wonder how much difference this will make though. I don't want to say that Good Smile isn't doing something good here, and I hope maybe we'll see more figure companies doing more to reach out to all of us non-Japanese folks who buy their figures. But in all honesty, right now there isn't much outside of big images that can't already be found by following one or two figure blogs. What I'd really like to see is for Good Smile to open up direct overseas purchasing. Maybe they're trying to keep funneling sales through their licensed distributors, like AAA Anime, which is understandable, but there are always things that don't make their way over -- most notably when they occasionally do limited edition orders through their website. For example, when they released the limited edition cosplay Konata figma at Wonder Festival, shortly afterwards they had limited orders up through their site for the figure. In order to buy that, I had to go through a proxy service which ended up costing me more than double the actual cost of the figure! Seriously, if they were to let overseas customers place orders for items like that directly through this new site, that would really put them out front of their competition.