Five years ago Corgi would have been owned by a company who seemed to know little about diecast models in general. They paid what seemed to be quite a bit of money to acquire a company that appeared to be producing healthy numbers of each new release and looked to be very viable.
Those involved in diecast retail knew that Corgi had been over producing for a long time (particularly on many of their vehicle ranges) and had been selling off over produced stock at very low prices. The stock had to be sold off or scrapped as Corgi no longer had their own warehousing so they had to pay rent on the storage space for unsold stock at a third party warehouse.
The people who managed Corgi at that time honestly believed that the more devout collectors wouldn’t notice that they could buy a model for around half price (or less in some cases) provided they were prepared to accept a model without a limited edition certificate and were also prepared to wait a few months for the over produced stock to get into the market.
Many collectors got wise to the way this worked and simply sat on their hands and kept their money in their pocket until the clearance stock came along. This meant fewer customers for each new release at the full retail price which meant more clearance stock to sell off cheap.
Many in the retail side felt it was only a matter of time before this situation would result in Corgi destroying their own market which was pretty much what happened.
The management sold out to new owners who, having taken stock of what they had bought, realised quite quickly that they hadn’t bought the money spinner they believed they had acquired. After battling on for a while the inevitable happened and the money ran out because sales of new releases weren’t paying the bills. Had it not been for Hornby it is quite likely that Corgi would no longer be with us.
Incidentally, the major players who were in Corgi management at the time when the over production problem was at its worst moved on to run airfix and the rest of that story is well known – Thanks again Hornby!
References can be difficult and in some cases contradictory when researching any colour scheme but there isn’t any excuse for getting things completely wrong. I am sure Hornby do consult quite widely when researching each model but it is inevitable that the occassional minor mistake creeps in particularly when the product is manufactured in a country where English is, at best, a second language.
I collect diecast because I don’t have the time and no longer have the eyesight to build from kits to what I regard as a good standard. I accept that diecast models will never be as perfect as a model built from a kit by a highly skilled modelmaker but I get far more pleasure from my diecasts (and accept that they do have some short comings) than I used to get from drawers full of unbuilt kits.

Good post, sums up things pretty well.

There is no doubting that errors are there but the same applies to plastic kits. It is also true that kit makers can do their own research and improve a model – at a cost and with no guarantee of perfection. Even they are in are in a minority so diecast is a perfectly good alternative for many.

There is of course the option of keeping your money in the wallet.