How to prepare your travel luggage for lugging toys home from overseas shopping - Most people use a small boxy trolley luggage to pack the things they need to wear and use when going on an overseas trip.  Many a times, we don’t really know what kind of toys we might buy during the trip, much less know the size of the toys and their packaging to cater a space for them in our luggage.

A suggestion is to pack in some foldable hand carry travel bags (those cylindrical shaped travel bags that some tour agencies tend to give out to their customers for free) in your travel trolley luggage.  If you have no problems hand carrying your toy purchases in their given shopping bags, then do it that way if you prefer. 

If not, some MOC and smaller MIB toys are better off packed in your boxy trolley luggage to protect them.  Use your clothes as padding to stop the toys from moving about in your trolley luggage.  Your excess clothes can be packed into the foldable travel bags that you brought along and then padlocked before checking them all in with the main luggage!

Differentiate between impulse buying and passionate buying of fad toys - Fad toys do what they do, they are sold to people using a marketing strategy that based on hype at the point in time, especially for movie related toys. 

The hype usually reaches a high point where collectors get most crazy about the toys and there is frenzy to grab them.  But when the movie stops showing in the cinemas and after thehype dies down, the toys in the stores become peg and shelf warmers, while those already in our collections are reminders of our unexplainable short term craze over them back then. 

So in short, do think and consider very carefully before you part with your hard earned income, and follow the herd instinct with other people in the next fad toys frenzy!

Some toys deteriorate in tropical climate - I’ve had vintage My Little Pony and She-Ra toys from the 80’s whose plastic surfaces became oily or sticky with age and exposure to our hot and humid climate.  Most of the times they can be salvaged by using disposable wet wipes to rub onto the affected surfaces to remove the oily and sticky layers. 

If you are comfortable with washing your toys, you can also consider running them under tap water, then rub them thoroughly with soap before rinsing them.  Sometimes a few rounds of washing are required to remove all the oil and dirt.  

Toys with rooted hair can have added steps of having their hair shampooed, conditioned and then rinsed.  Leave them to dry off naturally or under a fan, instead of using a hair drying on them. 

Sometimes in the most unfortunate circumstances, the rooted hair becomes too brittle with age and exposure that they break off easily, especially when you wet the hair during washing.  At this stage, the toy is ruined.  By then, you either have to discard it, or send it to a customizer to re-root it with replacement hair.  That would mean extra costs!

Know the hidden costs of toy collecting - Do realise that in the midst of this hobby, you do inevitably somehow end up incurring more costs like: shipping costs to import them, plus getting special display cabinets, storage boxes, zipper bags of all sizes, cleaning and customizing materials, and even self-storage rental fees etc. to keep and maintain your toys.  Hence the costs of toy collecting do not just end at the point of purchasing the respective toys!

Keep proper toy inventory records of not only the cost of each toy purchase, but also where exactly you have stored them.  This makes retrieving and pricing them for resale more convenient, should you choose to clear them away one day.  In a way, it also facilitates an exit strategy for your toy hobby should you decide to call it quits one day!

I recall reading about a similar topic to this on Jcee’s blog some time ago.  I’ll be going off for my mid year short vacation to Hong Kong tomorrow and will be back 5 days later. 

While I’ve finished packing all the things I need to use for my trip, I’m still considering whether to bring a toy along for fun photography while on holiday.  I used to do this many years ago when I was much newer into toy collecting.  For my previous vacation to the US last year, I didn’t do it.

One thing about bringing toys out with me is that I worry they might get damaged, lose their parts, or worse, get completely lost by some unforeseen mishap, which I am not prepared to accept.  That’s why my toys are called collectibles that are supposed to stay at home and just look pretty for my enjoyment, LOL!

Oh well, I might as well forget this thought and just go on my long overdue holiday without any toys.  Maybe I’ll buy a new toy in Hong Kong and take photos of it there.  That would be a good alternative!

I’d often pondered over this topic on what hobby or pastime would I most likely have today if I didn’t collect toys.  It’s something like an alternate reality of my life.  I guess I would have to trace back to my childhood where I loved to read extensively on books about animals, wildlife conservation, and my top favourite topic - horses! 

Yes in a way, my love for horses got me into collecting My Little Pony, and also LEGO medieval series like the knights and horses sets since my early teens till now.  I might have even considered a career to do with horses, but somehow I didn’t.  So I sort of made up for it by collecting replicas of horses or things related to horses, including their books and toys. 

I also used to collect models of different kinds of wildlife, but all that fizzled out rapidly after I discovered that reading about them is more interesting than collecting their replicas, of which very few in the market are very lifelike enough for my liking.  So in some ways, my toy collecting patterns do reflect my likes and a great deal of my psychic.

If I didn’t collect toys, I’d most probably spend most of my free time pursuing interests related to these major passions in my life.  Perhaps I would be a career or hobby involved with close to the real things.  Maybe I would work in an animal related or wildlife conservation industry, which tend to have rather long hours.  Hence I probably won’t have the time to go shopping or internet surfing for toys.  I’d be too dead tired from all the physical work and intensive research to go anywhere or do anything else. 

What about you?  Let’s say if you collect army toys, do you think you could have done a career or another hobby that is closer to the real thing?  If you have the chance to be closer to the real deal and have to give up your toy hobby for it, will you do it?  Feel free to share your views here!

Our local news scene was recently hit by an unexpected and unprecedented island wide breakdown of NETS and credit card network.  This undoubtedly caused great inconvenience to countless customers of that bank involved when people realised that they could not withdraw cash at the ATMs, log on to their online bank accounts, and use their credit cards etc., during those harrowing 7 hours of breakdown.

For me, I was one of those who were affected as I wanted to buy something at a supermarket on that morning.  Fortunately I had enough cash with me then.  That was when I first became aware that such a thing happened that day, before hearing the media report it on tv or radio. 

The upside is that the inconvenience period happened from 3am to around 10am on the same day, whereby many retailers were not opened for business yet.  The repercussions could had been far worse.  Anyway to cut a long story short, the network was restored by noon on that day.  The bank had apologised and would report the findings of their investigations soon.

The above incident led me to think - If I were at a departmental store or at a toy shop where I wanted to buy some toys but I could not use my NETS or credit cards to pay for them, that would have been such a terrible downer for me!  It would especially be so if I had wanted to get those toys for the longest time and that they were on sale or rather hard to come by for me.  I don’t know how else I would react, other than being very sorely disappointed.

How about you?  If you were put in that inconvenient position when you have some very coveted toys to buy, what would your reaction be?  Give up buying the toys, or ask the store to reserve for you till the network is restored or till you come back with the cash etc.,?  Do share your comments here! 

Recently there was an article which I read with interest.  It was about the growing local trends of more and more people renting secure and air-conditioned self storage space for reasonable sums per month, to store their excess possessions that could not fit into their homes.

The original use for such space rental facilities was mainly for people to store their furniture etc., while their homes were being renovated, and while they stayed at smaller and temporary premises elsewhere.  Gradually when people started home based businesses and needed more space to store their goods and equipment, this storage solution worked well with them too. 

Then over the years as hobbies that involve collecting physical items became more widespread, people even rented space to house and store their precious collectible items!  This is also compounded by the lack of land in Singapore to build bigger average homes for all of us. 

It has indeed become a growing trend, though I first heard of this kind of external storage method for collectibles more than 10 years.  Back then a toy collector that I knew was already using a similar concept storage service, but the ‘warehouse’ back then wasn’t as sophisticated as the ones we have today.

Although I don’t use the above kind of self storage service for my toys collection, I do however treat my rental toy lockers at Toy Outpost as a kind of external storage facility for my toys that I don’t mind selling away.  In a way it’s better than keeping them at home where they are not seen and do nothing useful for me.

While the self storage may seem to be the solution for collectors in general, it ultimately does not address the root causes of such phenomena.  And that is, people are basically buying too many things for them to store at home.  Perhaps it’s true that our homes in Singapore are getting smaller, so some people feel that it’s out of their control.  Like it or not, land scarcity in Singapore is here to stay.  We can’t further expand our territories by a lot more.

However, our minds and how we manage our shopaholic emotions are flexible and not as rigid as physical space.  Hence, there is a pressing need for hardcore toy collectors to be focused in their toy collecting hobbies, instead of collecting nearly every fad toyline that comes along every year, collecting every toy in a toyline so as to “complete the sets”.  

We need to be aware of that modern media is throwing all kinds marketing tactics at us everyday, to entice us to part with our hard earned income more readily and buy things that we may and may not really need.  Be especially aware of “addiction” products and services, such as collectible toys and gaming.  “Addiction” businesses thrive on our addiction to what they offer. 

Older generations tend to save up much more than the younger ones do because there were much lesser entertainment and addiction distractions in the old days.  Today many people like to visit shopping malls when they are bored.  There is even a term called “shopping therapy” to relieve stress!

So the next time you decide to make your next purchase of anything, do be more aware of what factors are  influencing you to spend, and to consider very carefully whether you really need to.  We need take charge of our spending habits as early in our lives as possible.  Using self storage may seem like a solution, but if our uncontrolled spending and collecting habits persist, we’ll just end up renting more space to ’solve’ a space constraint problem that isn’t really getting solved.

But we don’t have to totally give up our toys collecting hobby.  Collecting in moderation and culling periodically will help to keep our toys population in check and manageable for us to enjoy the hobby.  I hope that you find this article useful.  Happy toys collecting!

While many collectors first pick up toy collecting hobby based on their inborn love for toys and what they represent for them, a lot of other collectors end up collecting toys because they were influenced by friends who happen to be serious toy collectors.  After admiring the sizeable toy collections of others, some collectors start this hobby and have been “stuck” and “deeply poisoned” ever since.

From the number of years I’ve devoted to toy collecting, I can safely conclude that it’s going to be my life long hobby.  I started and am still in it because I love toys for they are and what they represent to me.  I used to be an “underground” collector before the days of the internet.  Then after learning from the world wide web that toy collecting is a popular and serious hobby all over the world, I became more opened about it.  

What about you?  Is toy collecting your life long hobby, or just a passing phase in your life?  Feel free to share your thoughts and comments here!