Hornby has been in the toy business since the early 1900s, but has recently been struggling after losing £4.5m in the wake of a London Olympics themed campaign that never took off. Their new product doesn’t seem to be having nearly as much trouble getting off the ground.
Since launching the model aircraft – an imitation Hawker Typhoon that costs about £100 and has more than 500 parts – the company has sold more than 8000 units. The complicated toy is mostly being purchased by adults who make of hobby of building model aircraft, and its designer has stated that building the plane could take as long as a year.
The Hawker Typhoon was a British single-seat fighter and bomber that served in WWII primarily as a low-altitude interceptor. It was often flown against the Luftwaffe’s Focke-WulfFw 190, and was in fact the only RAF fighter capable of catching the german fighter at low altitudes. Equipped with machine guns, bombs, and ground attack rockets, the Hawker Typhoon became a very successful ground-attack aircraft in the Second World War, The Guardian reports.
After having to close the warehouse near the company’s headquarters in June, a decision motivated in part because of the lost revenue of the previous year, Hornby could use just about any boost in sales that it can get. Hopefully the supply problems that have plagued the last few years of their toy production don’t have any impact on their new model.