Dollfie Shortage (and General How Many Are Made of Each Model Thread)

Seasons greetings everyone,

Towa and I want to get another doll, but as many of you have noticed... Dollfies are in short supply right now! We have a Dollfie friend store here in the UK, but they have practically no dolls (or bodies). I had a look on Volks Japan last night but they don't appear to have that many either. Even Karin is in short supply... Are they going to make a new line of basic models soon? Will Towa be discontinued too?

So that got me thinking... how many Dollfies are created each year? How many of each model do they make? All I know is that they only made 100 Chobits Chi's, but that was a long time ago now. How many Rem/Ram or Snow Mikus do they make? Does anybody know?

I've resigned myself to waiting for the next grail doll to appear on Mandarake. Plan B is to find a proxy to buy us a tan girl when they're available again as it's looking unlikely that visiting Japan will be a possibility next year.

The last few times Volks added to or changed the standard DD lineup, it was at the annual DD Gathering, which happened for 2021 already.  Probably just Christmas shopping and a lull in production runs.  I think the only standard model that won't restock right now is Aoi 2nd.  

There's no concrete info on how many DDs are made in a year.  It's safe to say that Volks makes thousands of bodies a year, I wouldn't be surprised if they make around 10,000 bodies per year.  Collab dolls?  Your guess is as good as mine.  I will say that when a DD collab ends up on the Volks JP store for months on end, Volks would consider that collab a failure.  Sure, they want to keep certain items (standard dolls, bodies, parts, some apparel) in stock year round, but Collab dolls should sell fast, and not take up warehouse space.  10 Sailor Mercury or Mari Illustrious Makinami dolls take up space better devoted to 15 DD bodies.  It backs up the restock of those standard items.   

I know that the typhoon in October 2019 damaged some of their manufacturing facilities, which led to major delays in shipping most 2B/9S orders.  And then there's the pandemic right afterwards.  I could see that cutting down on their production numbers, especially for standard items.

A possible explanation for the shortage on the Japanese site is, that they have wheeled off a fair bit of stock to Tokyo, to offer at Dollpa this Sunday. If that's the case, any unsold stuff from there should end back up on the webstore eventually.

 

Regarding how many DDs are made, that's really hard to estimate.

The only metric that's somewhat available are the "serial" numbers of Dream Choice dolls. Between spring 2020 and fall 2021 they have apparently sold about 800 Dream Choice dolls, which amounts to a little less than 1.5 Dream Choice per day.

 Might be due to supply chain shortages.

Yeah, you can't forget that basically every facet of the doll hobby has been hit by the pandemic. It was hard even for me to find proper PPE to do faceups with because all vapor masks are being bought up or redirected due to medical need.