2016 Rewind – LobsterDiecast’s Review Of The Year

December 28th 2016

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2016 Rewind - LobsterDiecast's Review Of The Year

In the distant future, when people who write history books write about 2016 they will probably have plenty of material to work with. But at LobsterDiecast we won’t concern ourselves too much with that and will restrict our review of 2016 to what’s happened in the world of LobsterDiecast and the diecast world in general.

And in that regard, 2016 has been a pretty good year. We’ve seen some great new releases arrive and subsequently sell out, a few new ranges establish themselves as firm favourites and we’ve been to some fantastic car shows (and a couple of what we could call slightly less fantastic ones too I suppose…) plus we’ve met loads of our customers both new and old which is always one of the highlights of doing what we do.

This year saw the introduction by Minichamps of the first releases from their Maxichamps brand – essentially older Minichamps castings brought up to date with new colours and the like at much reduced prices. Whilst its still early days for the range, so far it has proved very popular offering Minichamps quality without Minichamps prices… After some rather lengthy delays, Cult Scale Models settled their release schedule down to something like the advertised release dates and even with a slight delay the models were well worth the wait as the quality is absolutely first rate and all the releases went to very happy collectors, selling out in no time at all. In smaller scales, Oxford Diecast continued to expand their vast and innovative range in 1:76 scale with hundreds of new releases over the course of the year covering everything from 1920’s Austins to the Nissan Qashqai and pretty much all points in between. Theres a lot more to come from Oxford Diecast and it’s a range we’re really pleased to be able to bring you more of in 2017 and beyond. After a quiet 2015 and first part of 2016, Norev got back into their stride with some superb new releases in 1:43 and 1:18 scale which proved as popular as ever. Corgi had a year of consolidation and delivered a range that whilst it might not have featured any new castings, offered a solid selection of favourites which proved to be popular. Here’s hoping that 2017 sees one or two new castings introduced though…

In things partwork, we had new 1:24 partwork releases which proved massively popular plus new 1:43 Opels, classic French cars from the Voitures De Mon Pere series as well as others too numerous to mention. 2017 will bring more new partwork releases, some of which we’ve already mentioned and some which we’ll be telling you about soon!

Show season followed a familiar pattern with a couple of new additions. Starting as ever at the always great Stanford Hall VW Show – which is where we’ll be starting 2017’s show season – we then went into deepest Kent for Motors By The Moat. This proved to be a superb weekend show at a fantastic venue and one we’ll be returning to in the coming year. Others such as All Types VW, Pendle Powerfest, VW Festival and the NEC Classic Motor Show were all superb, bigger and better than ever proving to everyone that you don’t change a winning formula rather just improve and evolve it. How we wish the organisers of the Yorkshire Post Motor Show had known this. In 2015 this was a fantastic show but a move to new grounds for 2016 just didn’t work and left disappointment all round. Similarly a couple of other shows felt that their undoubted popularity justified some significant price hikes. That might be great news for their takings but less so for their continuity.

Overall though, 2016 has been pretty good. We’ve got plans in place to make 2017 even better with new a couple of new ranges introducing themselves through the year plus more of some of our most popular ranges with even wider selections in store now! Show season for 2017 is shaping up nicely with a couple of new additions and as we get into January we’ll bring you more detail on what to expect and where to see us through the course of the year. Finally, 2017 is LobsterDiecast’s tenth birthday. We should probably do something special to celebrate I suppose…