The original Touchability Boxes only came with the Family Arabians, for a very brief period of time in the late 1960s. They were an experiment in more retail-friendly packaging that went… poorly.
Horses got scuffed, horses got stolen, and they were hard to stack and store on the shelf. It’d be another five years before they’d finally just go with the closed “white boxes” all of us who bought horses in the 1970s knew and loved.
They did an updated version of the Touchability Box in 2009/2010 for the My Favorite Horse Series, a line of older molds – like Buckshot, Sherman Morgan, Quarter Horse Yearling – designed with younger kids in mind.
They experimented with it again on the presumption that touching a Breyer horse will make a kid more likely to want it.
(Well, it certainly does in my case!)
That experiment didn’t last long either – same problems as before, duh – and they went right back to the standard clear plastic boxes shortly thereafter.
The original Touchability Boxes are extremely scarce, and I’m lucky to have the one that I have, that I purchased back in 1998 for the then kinda-scary price of $50.00 – and sight unseen, too!
I would say that in spite of the steep price tag I paid for my Gray Appaloosa FAS over twenty years ago, it was a good investment. I could probably sell it for at least ten times that in less time than it would take me to go to the fridge and grab a drink.
In case your rare packaging radar went off, this is not going to happen. Though when things like this happen, it makes me think twice:
In spite of my shortage of fun money so close to BreyerFest, one does not let a scarce and pretty Old Timer slip by. I’ll just have to extra careful with my trip money this this year, I guess.
(Which I should be doing anyway, but we all know how that goes!)
2 comments:
I just received a beautiful Wedgewood Blue also, but was so disappointed that she had a big glaring rub on her barrel. Currently going through a exchange, so don't know what I will finally end up with. Don't know if any others had this problem. Not sure if the open box had something to do with it during production.
I also got a beautiful Wedgewood. She also had a rub on her hip and not all the way through to white so was lucky. If the box was even a half-an inch or an inch deeper she probably would have been fine-especially if Breyer would have put some bubble wrap on the bare side to cushion. At least mine was fine on the box side which I was surprised!
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