This Year's Appreciation Offer

Oh boy, I don’t even know where to begin.

Well, this has been an interesting three days, hasn’t it?

I was excited for the Collector’s Club Appreciation Sale – until I discovered that it was going to go live at 2 p.m. on Wednesday, with no way for me to get Internet access until 3 p.m. at the very earliest.

Initially I thought that because previous sales took hours to sell out, that I still had a chance but alas, no. 

While I was a little on the fence about participating anyway, I did bypass a couple of sales on items that I already had in my cart, just in case. The Double Discount Sale weekend was especially hard to ignore!

My luck has been exceptionally good model-horse-wise for the past month, though: that beautiful Yellow Mount, the Showcase Collection Grazing Mare, an Avoriaz and (literally arriving just hours ago, and still in his box) a Reuben, too.

So I wasn’t as bummed as I could have been.

I was not entirely surprised that Reeves decided to open up the offer again over the weekend for people who were not available to participate previously. The start time (2 p.m. on a Wednesday) was awkward for a lot of people, and there were several reported instances of ordering glitches – Regular Run items that the site interpreted as ineligible for the program.

But the most important factor in their decision wasn’t the whiners on Facebook: it was the fact that it sold out in 27 minutes. (In case you were wondering about the math, that’s an order every two seconds. Yikes!) It’s pretty clear that they vastly underestimated the demand for this offer.

I made some suggestions elsewhere online that next year’s sale should be tweaked to be more inclusive – like (for instance) shifting the start time to something a little bit later to accommodate shift workers on the East Coast, and people on lunch breaks on the West Coast who might not have Internet access at work. (Because surprise, people: not a lot of us do, nor do many of us see it as a hardship.)

And/or also truly making it a Customer Appreciation Sale by opening up the window of opportunity to everyone – but limiting it to a set number of hours. Have a quantity of Glosses on-hand to accommodate the first X number of customers, and have the rest of the orders that get in before the expiration time put on backorder.

And I’ll be darned if I find myself reading the new offer in my e-mail box this afternoon and finding variations of these two ideas being implemented for the Second Chance offer right now.

I also suggested the possibility of making the Gloss item selectable – thus neutralizing the desirability issue a bit, since that means they’d make more of the popular ones and less of the less popular ones. But that was clearly wish fulfillment on my part – who wouldn’t love the option of Glosses made to order?

Speaking about the less popular ones, I feel so sad for all those poor, unwanted Glossy Enzos! I don’t have any particularly negative feelings toward the mold itself (other than its narrowness) and you know I love minimal pintos, so I would not have been among the disappointed if I had gotten one. Though of the original five Glosses, Latigo Dun It is the only one that’s making me wince a bit. Another expensive and possibly unattainable Smart Chic Olena, ouch…

(Looks at my Gloss Kodi, wonders if trading is a possibility.)

Other surprises/not really from the sale: that that goofy Classics/Freedom Series Cupcake sold out, as did the larger sizes of that totally boss Fighting Stallion t-shirt.

The Cupcake has since been restocked, and since the t-shirt is part of their 70th Anniversary lineup it will be, eventually.

It will be interesting to see what the CCA sale will be like next year; I suspect it will be more like the second offering than the first.

The only other changes I’d like to see is (a) fixing the notification issue: in light of the bajillion e-mails they send off during the holiday season, adding another e-mail notification of the sale the day before to all Collector’s Club members shouldn’t be all that hard, and (b) adding a link on the Appreciation Model page to the page that lists all the eligible purchase items would actually be super helpful, especially when one of your first or second choices is sold out and you don’t want to go wandering/wondering around the site looking for a substitution.