Humbrol brand possibly on the way out ?

[cherisy]

Having spent the best part of the afternoon trying to top up on humbrol enamel paints (and other products) I'm finding the shelves stripped bare and hearing the same thing from both LMS i visited . It seems no-one can get stock as humbrol/Airfix are holding on to it apparently  for sale from their website. There is rumour the reason they are doing this is that they are not sure another batch will be made which suggests more issues at Hornby  covid 19 notwithstanding.  

Even looking at the website the staple colours that are used for their kits are missing from the range.

Anyone else heard anything  ?

Apologies if this is in the wrong forum.

[ckw]

All I can tell you is that my local Hobbycraft appears to have had a major restock of Humbrol in the last month having had pretty bare shelves since re-opening.

 

 

31 minutes ago, cherisy said:

There is rumour the reason they are doing this is that they are not sure another batch will be made

 If Humbrol are keeping it out the shops it will be a self fulfilling prophecy .... frankly, I'm not a fan of Humbrol paint but will buy it simply because it is available, locally, now. If I'm going to buy paint on line there are other brands I will choose in preference. I am sure there are many others who buy Humbrol purely due to convenience.

 

Cheers

 

Colin

 

 

[cherisy]

20 minutes ago, ckw said:

All I can tell you is that my local Hobbycraft appears to have had a major restock of Humbrol in the last month having had pretty bare shelves since re-opening.

 

 

 If Humbrol are keeping it out the shops it will be a self fulfilling prophecy .... frankly, I'm not a fan of Humbrol paint but will buy it simply because it is available, locally, now. If I'm going to buy paint on line there are other brands I will choose in preference. I am sure there are many others who buy Humbrol purely due to convenience.

 

Cheers

 

Colin

 

 

Colin I quite agree. It will bite them on the backside .

I've you I buy it because its convenient  and I dont have pay daft postage as its considered  as hazardous. I much prefer xtracolour myself but if I can pop to the local hobbycraft  for a tin of something  basic like 33 for example then I will. 

Its quite a thing to see the paint racks ( and shelves) stripped bare. I wonder if this is just unique to me here in swindon

[cherisy]

27 minutes ago, ckw said:

All I can tell you is that my local Hobbycraft appears to have had a major restock of Humbrol in the last month having had pretty bare shelves since re-opening.

 

 

 If Humbrol are keeping it out the shops it will be a self fulfilling prophecy .... frankly, I'm not a fan of Humbrol paint but will buy it simply because it is available, locally, now. If I'm going to buy paint on line there are other brands I will choose in preference. I am sure there are many others who buy Humbrol purely due to convenience.

 

Cheers

 

My hobbycraft  is bare of everything  and they say they can't get hold of any stock. One wonders if its down to managers

[Black Knight]

1, Humbrol are unlikely to be thinking of withdrawing when they are currently issuing upgraded acyclic paints in a new style dropper bottle

 

2. Talking to staff in various hobby shops they all tell the same story, they can't get enough stock of hobby items. With almost everyone, from 5 year olds to 95 year olds turning to hobbies to put their time in during this continued, but lessened, 'lockdown', they are buying up the supplies at an unprecedent rate. 

Over the past couple of months I've sent my dottir, up in the remote Highlands, about 8 big boxes of hobby stuff as she cannot a. get out too much to get any thing, b the nearest place, Inverness, is short of hobby supplies.

[stevehnz]

I would be much saddened if this were true, Humbrol is the easiest range to access in my neck of the woods by a long shot. My LHS has good stocks, many recent & those recent production ones I've bought have been great to use, far better than pretty much anything from the last 25 or so years.

Steve.

[lasermonkey]

I would imagine that this is simply a case of Covid-related production issues versus a sudden spike in demand. As long as Airfix are making kits, I think Humbrol will be making paints to put on them.

 

Cheers,

Mark.

[Timn]

On 10/8/2020 at 4:34 PM, cherisy said:

My hobbycraft  is bare of everything  and they say they can't get hold of any stock. One wonders if its down to managers

My local store at York said they arent buying kits or paint due to lack of demand. They did say they are selling the quick kits as they make good stocking fillers for kiddies. I have moved recently and just found a little shop on the road out of Doncaster which is about 9 miles from me. Hoping to pop over when i get chance.

[Mr T]

Hobbycraft seem to have a weird way of stock control in any case. The Leeds store seems to sell out of everything and then have a massive restock (I am not just talking about kits here) about every six months or so. They also seem to take up and drop lines at the drop of a hat. 

[Tim R-T-C]

Enamels are still de rigur in railway modelling so I can't see them stopping production.

 

And the idea of them keeping back to sell online seems daft given the difficulties in posting out enamel paints.

 

Many corporate chains don't get supplies directly, they get from a central warehouse who will order a huge batch at a time and maybe Humbrol simply can't fulfil that at the moment.

[nheather]

Last time I went into my Hobbycraft it was practically bare of Tamiya paints, and the extra thin glue that I went in for.

 

I then went to a model shop for the glue - same story - but they told me that they were struggling to get any Tamiya stock.

 

Doesn’t mean Tamiya are on their way out, basically it is just Covid messing with everything.

 

Cheers,

 

Nigel

[Steve Noble]

I've not touched Humbrol for years. Don't know what they're like now but they had some real quality issues with their paint a while back. Mr Color, Alclad, Zero paints for me now. All a joy to use and good quality from every jar. If I had to rely on 'local' model shops for my supplies I'd have packed up making models years ago. The internet has killed the old fashioned high street shops, but it's here to stay. Postage costs can be high, but there's always somebody offering a cheaper or sometimes free delivery if you shop around. Wasting my time, fuel and money to travel 50-60 miles to my 'local' model shop only to find out that they don't stock what I need is more costly than the postage to be honest..

[cherisy]

12 minutes ago, Steve Noble said:

I've not touched Humbrol for years. Don't know what they're like now but they had some real quality issues with their paint a while back. Mr Color, Alclad, Zero paints for me now. All a joy to use and good quality from every jar. If I had to rely on 'local' model shops for my supplies I'd have packed up making models years ago. The internet has killed the old fashioned high street shops, but it's here to stay. Postage costs can be high, but there's always somebody offering a cheaper or sometimes free delivery if you shop around. Wasting my time, fuel and money to travel 50-60 miles to my 'local' model shop only to find out that they don't stock what I need is more costly than the postage to be honest..

True. The issue im finding with the local shops is humbrol/airfix seems to have stopped supplying to them which seems a daft business model ( no pun intended) o did e mail them asking about supply . The reply being they are out of stock and try my LMS. Z Didn't really answer  my question 

[Steve Noble]

7 minutes ago, cherisy said:

True. The issue im finding with the local shops is humbrol/airfix seems to have stopped supplying to them which seems a daft business model ( no pun intended) o did e mail them asking about supply . The reply being they are out of stock and try my LMS. Z Didn't really answer  my question 

First rule of business, look after your customer base. If you don't you won't have any and no business anymore. It doesn't take long for your customers to shop elsewhere if you fob them off all the time, or worse still, switch to another brand. I think at one time Humbrol had a great product, but they messed about with it, went through some issues with quality etc and people lost faith in it. Add to that the poor management in general and you have a recipe for disaster..

[Jamie @ Sovereign Hobbies]

I've got no idea what's going on and am loath to add to speculation, but it is worth pointing out that highstreet shops have huge overheads and expect huge margins accordingly. That's why the small model shops all close down sooner or later. As far as a manufacturer is concerned, that means the shops left including the likes of Hobbycraft only buy from you if they can retail for double what they pay you. By contrast, if you offer direct sales the retail price comes to you. Depending on many things that can make your quality of earnings several hundred percent better.

[cherisy]

23 minutes ago, Jamie @ Sovereign Hobbies said:

I've got no idea what's going on and am loath to add to speculation, but it is worth pointing out that highstreet shops have huge overheads and expect huge margins accordingly. That's why the small model shops all close down sooner or later. As far as a manufacturer is concerned, that means the shops left including the likes of Hobbycraft only buy from you if they can retail for double what they pay you. By contrast, if you offer direct sales the retail price comes to you. Depending on many things that can make your quality of earnings several hundred percent better.

So a simple question  of economics  then ?

[lesthegringo]

22 hours ago, cherisy said:

So a simple question  of economics  then ?

Unfortunately it seems everything boils down to that these days

[AltcarBoB]

My local hobby shop sells 4 brands of paint, Humbrol, Tamiya, Citadel and some very sparkly paints for RC cars. All the 4 racks are virtually empty and the shop owner doesnt know when stocks will be coming in. The Internet order place I order my Vallejo paints from the drop down list is about half greyed out because of no stock.

 

Paint manufacturers like so many have been caught out by the crazy times and I bet when it comes to shall we make 250,000 litres of house decorating paint or shall we make 50 litres of model paint I bet I know which product gets made first.

[Steve Noble]

32 minutes ago, AltcarBoB said:

Paint manufacturers like so many have been caught out by the crazy times and I bet when it comes to shall we make 250,000 litres of house decorating paint or shall we make 50 litres of model paint I bet I know which product gets made first.

I work at a warehouse that supplies the B&Q stores with paint. We've had an extra 6-8 trailer loads of paint per day over the usual amount. Everyone has gone mad painting their houses whilst the lockdown has been in effect. 

[halfwit]

I don't care for 'umbrol acrylics these days having recently used them for a model loco that I was working on and being disappointed with the quality. Now I've switched to Vallejo in the main (although it has the sticking power of cheese to a kitchen floor when there's dogs around), which I can get, along with Citadel, from Boyes. The odd thing about Boyes is that they sell Vallejo and Citadel paints but only stock a small selection of Warhammer figures etc., a few modelling tools but no plastic kits.

 

[Paul821]

Did not Hornby say, when announcing the dropper bottles, that they were looking to expand into new fields such as nail painting? If that is the case it would seem odd to now withdraw from the market but I presume with Covid restrictions the market for nail painting is still very limited.

[cherisy]

On 10/9/2020 at 7:56 PM, Tim R-T-C said:

Enamels are still de rigur in railway modelling so I can't see them stopping production.

 

And the idea of them keeping back to sell online seems daft given the difficulties in posting out enamel paints.

 

Many corporate chains don't get supplies directly, they get from a central warehouse who will order a huge batch at a time and maybe Humbrol simply can't fulfil that at the moment.

True.  I checked the airfix site and they are pretty much bereft of everything  apart from the bright primary colours that don't get used very often.  

[Black Knight]

I just went through 20 pages of paints on the Humbrol website

Each page had 24 paints listed

Mixed in were some paintbrushes and washes

It wasn't until the end of page 17 I came to the first paint as 'out of stock'

17 x 24 = 408 items/paints, less 1 (last item on page 17), and 56 for brushes et cetera = 351 paints in stock

pages 18 -20 = 2 x 24 + 16 (on page 20) = 64, less 10 non-paint items = 54 paints, out-of-stock

All the usual suspects are there; eg RLM colours, tanky colours, RAF colours, acrylics pots, enamel tinlettes and sprays

[Threadbear]

Seen on social media that Humbrol are ceasing production of enamel paints? Not sure how true this is. Ive got about 200 tins of the stuff, so should be okay for a while providing the tins haven`t dried out....

[davecov]

There is a more recent thread about this at

 

It has been withdrawn for the time being but it is going to be reformulated and reappear.

 

Dave