collectong news

 

Dear customers,

We apologize for the delays with the recent releases. Due to the supply issue from our distributor, many materials got delayed and we are still waiting for them to be finished and delivered to us.

We have a rough schedule for these releases.

1. Dune OC 
Dune OC will be shipped in the first week of September but due to the quality issue of the premium Ring, it needs to be remade again and the premium set will be shipped separately. Separate shipment for the premium will be paid by us. OC will be shipped first and we will send out the premiums in a separate shipment as soon as possible.

2. Matrix Resurrections 
We are currently packing and shipping out and OC will be shipped without the Cat premium first and the Cat premium will be shipped separately in the last week of August. Again the separate shipment will be paid by our store. Due to the delays with productions with the cat we cannot ship them together. We hope you could understand.

3. Motherboxes
At the moment, we are waiting for the first batch of motherboxes to arrive to us this week and due to the size and the weight of the product, we can only ship about 50-100 copies per day because we need to make many trips to our local courier's warehouse. We are working very hard to ship out these products and please wait for our tracking number.

4. Batman 
Singles will be shipped first and OC will shipped afterward due to issues adjusting the glow of OC boxes. We are receiving singles at the moment so there will be some gap between singles and OC shipments.

5. The Suicide Squad 
The Suicide Squad will pre-order this month or next month based on how well we handle the shipments with the delayed releases.

Thank you very much and we apologize for the delays again.

Here's the another photo of the HU motherbox photo in a different angle.

Best regards,
Collectong

Hey guys, this is John and I want to make a rather long announcement with our production updates so please read this post if you are interested in what we are doing lately with our production.

Everyone in the office is working really hard to catch up with the delayed releases and we are finally seeing some light at the end of the tunnel. Releases without premiums are getting finished on time and those with premiums, we are releasing them first to our retailers and premiums will be shipped within September.

This year's been a quite disgusting year for us for how much we had to suffer with the production delays and schedule changes. There were multiple lockdowns with our factories and because of these lockdowns, we are receiving our goods and materials by sea. By truck, delivery could be drove down in a day but now it takes 4-5 days to just deliver the goods to us.  When we are making samples, returning the shipment also takes weeks so we are facing some difficulties we've never had in the past. Also, we are making things that we've never made in the past so our (my) forecasting skill is already quite poor but it made things worse thinking that we could finish these productions in a month or two. After we started to work on these materials, we've realized that we had no idea how long it was going to take at all.

We have learned more about production with different materials but these delays really made us work in a chaotic environment and ultimately made our collectors wait a long time for the products. We sincerely apologize for the delays because this was totally not intended by us but with different external and internal factors, we've faced the longest production delays with our products. We learned a lot from this experience so in the future, we hope to create more valuable collectibles for our collectors so we hope our collectors could understand our difficulties.

For the motherboxes, we have received the first batch of motherboxes last week and we were QCing and packing some of the products. However, we found some products to have differences from our production samples so we've decided to postpone the release again. We want to make sure that our product meets our expectations and standards and we also believe that our collectors expect the same from us. I feel quite sick writing this because this project has been going on for a very very long time and delaying this was the last thing we wanted to do.

We want to make a few more improvements by remaking some of the boxes and returning some faulties back to the factory. We really apologize to every collector who has been waiting such a long time for this release. We've been making a lot of premiums recently and frankly the production schedule is quite different from printing schedule. With printing related materials, In the worst case scenario, they can be redone in a couple of weeks or at most a month but when it comes to making premiums with resin, metal and other materials, we are expecting at least 1 month to 2 month for remaking and redoing things again. We are definitely learning and getting better at this so we won't make the same mistake of delaying releases for months in the future. We will notify our retailers in regards to this matter and they will contact each collect directly about the delays.  Again, we apologize for the delays and we hope to get everything finished within September.

Thank you very much for reading and we will make more posts with the updates with our next releases with Exclusive Steelbooks, global releases and consumer products soon.

Best regards,
John

[Tentative Schedule for Old & New Releases]

Dear customers,

We've received the latest update with the delivery schedule for the remaining releases and the new ones.

1. ZSJL Mother boxes - Late September - Early October (Base on the packing speed).  
2. Dune Premium Box - Late October
3. Batman OC Box - Late September - Early October
4. The Suicide Squad Pre-order - Late September
5. 2001 Space Odyssey Pre-order - Late October

We hope to ship out the goods as soon as possible for our customers.

Thank you.
Collectong

Hi guys, this is John from Manta Lab. I hope everyone is well and ready for the holidays soon. This year is Manta Lab's 7th Anniversary and we want to thank our collectors for the success of this business. Every year we thought about making unique items that we could give away as anniversary gifts and we've finally made something this time.

We decided to make the steelbook frame that our collectors could display their Manta's (or your favorite retailer's) grail steelbook on the wall. It has magnet backings to hold the steelbook and the metal plate. The idea came from looking at platinum record frames that artists have in their studios and we hope our collectors could have fun hanging their favorite grail steelbook on the wall. Metal plate is one of the prototypes and final product will have less yellow and glossy finish.

You will be able to get the first frame as our anniversary gift from our retailers (shipping excluded) and if you would like to purchase more, it will be available for sale later. We are thinking about different plate ideas so that our collectors can swap the existing plate to create new looks with the frame in the future.

Thanks for the support as always and we will come back with the anniversary post or more product information soon.

Best regards,
John

We are a little late with the 7th Anniversary post and we thought it would be a good time to combine it with a New Year's post. We wish every collector a Happy New Year and the best things to come in 2023. The 2022 was not an easy year for us due to many external problems coming from Covid but we are happy that we were able to release a lot of collectibles. We expect Covid to affect us in early 2023 but we can only try our best in a given situation. Thank you for collecting ML products and have a great holiday!

Dear Customers,

Happy CNY everyone! We are happy to announce the 2023 exclusive steelbook releases (Tentative). All releases from the list are not guaranteed. 2022 releases that were not released in 2022 may not release in 2023 due to issues from our distributor.

At the moment, we are still waiting for the Dune Premiums that are very long due but when CNY holidays finish with factories, they should begin producing the premiums again. We sincerely apologise for the delay with the premiums and we hope to send them out as soon as possible.

Thank you for your support and Happy CNY again.

Best regards,
Collectong

Hello! We are looking for great illustrators to work with us for our future steelbooks releases.
If you are interested, please feel free to send us an email with portfolio or link to your work at support@mantalab.com.
Thank you very much for your interest!
Best regards,
Manta Lab