The Things We Value

I was doing a little pricing research on eBay this week – a few pieces are already up on MHSP, with more to follow throughout the weekend – and I have to say that I am utterly befuddled by the high prices Flockies are commanding there.

I’m not talking of the rare Regular Runs or Special Runs ones, or the occasional Test pieces that show up, but the undocumented “free range” ones that I had thought the hobby had all agreed were basically Customs.

It's no secret that I am not a big fan of Flockies: they creep me out, especially the ones with the glass eyes. But I will also admit that the ones made by the Riegeseckers for Breyer – the Miniature Series in the Regular Run catalogs, and all the assorted pieces available via holiday mail-order catalogs – have both historical and monetary value. And some people have taste different than my own. (Whatever you want to keep on the shelf in your horse room is your own business!)

These custom ones have some, too – they were sort of a thing in the hobby for a while, oddly enough – but the prices I’ve been seeing seem way out of proportion.

Am I missing something? Is it something I should be glad I missed? Was there a rumor of them being Tests/Culls/Decos under the fake fur-like substance? Is it a bit of bad intel multiplied by a surplus of fun money?

It seems so weird to me; sometimes I understand completely why something becomes popular, desirable, or expensive, but this one makes me shrug my shoulders.

It’s one of the many reasons I try to avoid giving out advice on value and pricing. If I were able to shape the universe as I saw fit, something like this would be more valued than it is:

It’s a Matte Black Pinto Western Pony. Like its Palomino counterpart, the majority of them are Gloss, not Matte. It’s actually a rather scarce piece, in any condition – even body quality, as here.

The Black Pinto is slightly more common than its Palomino counterpart – I see a small handful of them in the wild every year, while the Matte Palomino is about as common as the Matte Walking Horned Hereford Bull, and that one took me nearly a decade to acquire.

She came in what wasn’t supposed to be – but ended up being – a body box lot. She wasn’t the only interesting piece in the lot, but I’ll get to them when the time and moment is right.

Anyone remember Steha?

Another short one today - I’m in the final throes of a big, complicated non-horse, non-writing project, and I don’t want to lose my momentum. (It’ll be done today, and then I’ll move on to the next big, complicated non-horse, non-writing project. Yes, I do have way too many hobbies!)

Some hobbyists think that Reeves’ involvement in the wonderful world of model horses began in late 1984, when they acquired the Breyer brand. This is not so: prior to that, they were the exclusive U.S. distributor of Steha Horses.

I didn’t know this until recently, myself. A few years ago, I purchased a couple of Reeves’ Great Lines Catalogues on eBay. These books contain bound copies of dealer catalogs of all of the lines that Reeves imported and distributed. I found a Steha catalog bound in the 1981-82 edition.


I don’t have a lot of data about Steha in my archives, aside from this bound-in dealer’s catalog. Stehas were flocked and haired horses made in West Germany, and were available from the 1950s to (at least) the early 1980s. Here’s a link to a good-sized picture of one:

http://www.instappraisal.com/content/steha-horse

Stehas were never a big part of the model horse world, at least in the U.S. First of all, they weren’t very realistic: some were nicer than others, but none of them could pass competitive muster, even in the more forgiving earlier days of the hobby. Second, they were rather expensive compared to Breyers: the wholesale prices for Traditional-scale Breyers in 1981 ranged from $3-6; the wholesale prices for comparable Stehas were $14-19! Yikes!

Some Steha items did find a place in the hobby: their carts and wagons were surprisingly nice, and of much better quality than hobbyists were able to create for themselves at the time.


I remember at least one local toy store that carried Stehas in the 1970s, but I never actually owned one. Aside from being expensive and homely, I was never a big fan of flockies in general: they’re hard to keep clean, and they have a nasty habit of yellowing, shedding and disintegrating.

Stehas are rather expensive and hard to come by nowadays, presumably for the same reason. If I had known back then that they’d have a Breyer connection now, I might have parceled out a bit of my allowance money and bought one.