Department 56 Quality Question

My "town' scene on my layout it relatively small, so I have the luxury of picking and choosing what I consider to be the "good" Lemax items.  While not as classy as the Dept. 56 offerings in most cases, I have been able to find a number of good ones - the trick is avoiding those with figures in the windows as I use O gauge figures and obviously the Lemax figures are like ogres compared to them.  My city hall, library, police station, and fire station are all pretty good, - not cartoonish, which is what I try to avoid.  The bonus is that they are a fraction of the cost of Dpt. 56 buildings and that's at MSRP.   If I keep my eyes open, I can get them for half of to 70% off close to Christmas.  The quality is what it is, and for me it's more than enough for seasonal work and adequate for full time deployment.  I always felt that Dpt. was a bit overpriced to begin with.  

Department 56 is like any other premium brand -- it has to keep prices high and volume low in order to retain its coveted status.  There have been articles about the downfall of the Coach label (women's purses, wallets, etc).  It fell out of favor as its products became too wildly distributed.  If everyone of all income classes is walking around with a Coach bag, its status is shot.

I haven't been looking at the buildings long enough to know how the quality has changed over the years, but I agree that they have some stiff competition from the likes of Lemax and other brands.  Heck, one of my favorite buildings is a knockoff brand I can't even remember at the moment.  In addition, for most Christmas villages in low lights and with everything else going on around it, you don't need perfection for the buildings not right up in the front.  If it is true that the Department 56 quality has gone downhill, they do need to step up their game in order to command the prices they charge.  But from my eye, they do still have a slight edge of the other brands.

But there are hits and misses in every line.  I've been suprisingly impressed with some of the Kohl's St Nicholas Square buildings.  But in recent years, many of them have been of lesser quality.

That said, where I think Department 56 really excels is in their figurines and accessories.  No other brand comes close to that quality.  It's probably not worth it to the other brands to put their focus there because they know they can't sell their figurines for much more than they do now.  It's hard for most to stomach paying $20 for a figurine.

I have between 35--40 buildings in my collection of which probably 30 are Dept. 56.  The others are LeMax.  I use probably 10 Dept. 56 on my layout and the remainder I set up solely for Christmas holidays on a series of bookshelves.  I started to collect Dicken's Village years ago just for display.  Actually, I found the later editions much more detailed than the earlier ones, although more expensive.  True scale for 0 gauge is a problem so you have to pick and choose the buildings wisely and set them up with some distance to make them fit in.  I acquired some other Dept. 56 pieces from other series for my layout.  The figures of which I have many are definitely not in scale, either for my train or even with the buildings for that matter.  The LeMax's are nice but a bit more fragile and have plastic parts that tend to break off (so keep some superglue handy).  My biggest disappointment with Dept. 56 is that I started to collect the Williamsburg Series, but it does not seem to be well distributed in my area anymore and the pieces don't seem to grow as fast as other collections.  

We have some 200+ Dept 56 buildings and easily as many figures, primarily Dickins, Christmas in the City, and more North Pole than Santa has. Our feeling is that the quality improved when D56 first sold but has now begun to decline.

Price... we no longer buy new. The dollar increase for new vs the decrease in resale value and large availability of pre-owned buildings, figures, etc, resulted in our limiting our purchases and buying used. We did buy the Chrysler building when Amazon was selling it so cheap. The forum alerted us to the opportunity and my wife found it under the tree.

in honesty, we used to buy most new items in three villages but after the sale, the number of offerings increased to the point that space became an issue and we were not pleased at the dramatic increase. Excitement decreased, most of the local dealers dropped the line, and one which invested in Seasons Bay went out of business. The closest dealer is in Williamsburg which is an hour away.

We wait and buy for 50% and usually less and are far more selective. The $$$ spent with D56 are probably 10% of what we used to spend. it's not the same company.

The only D56 building that I bought this year was the one with the Santa Claus in the house. I thought it was as good as any other building. That said, looking at the 2015 offerings, I can plainly see that the detail has taken a few backward steps toward the early years of Dept. 56. Unfortunately, the prices seem to have gone sky high and the building have shrunk. The "Snowflake House" appears much too small for the $140.00 price.

This may be the end of D56 for me.

My feelings exactly when I got the email today.  When I saw the $130 pricetag, I was thinking, "Gee this must be a good sized building.  WRONG!!!"  I was shocked to see it was the size of buildings I paid $75-$85 several years ago.

Still producing some nice stuff, but I'm SO glad I built my roster of Dept. 56 Christmas In The City back when I did. 

David

Yes.  I also purchased mine at 50% off each year after Christmas, but those sales are  no longer happening around here.  Two years ago, I bought 16 at a yard sale at about $6.00 each.  I am not collecting anymore simply due to lack of space and also because, really, how much can you collect anyway and still have the time to enjoy them in your lifetime?

I know there's always this 'greed' factor baked into the perception of price increases, but for the circle of contacts I have, China's labor market price escalation has had a lot to do with it.  Change of management/ownership might be a contributor, since margins and manufacturing/shipping contracts can sometimes be subject to change at the same time as ownership. 

That said, I didn't hear a lot of whimpering and whining about the (comparable) pricing of Woodland Scenics' latest O buildings.  Both Dept. 56 and WS buildings have a HUGE amount of artistic manual labor content.  In fact, I would suggest that the Dept. 56 cast ceramic building 'bones' are more expensive to manufacture than the plastic molded 'bones' of the WS buildings. (You don't have to fire WS buildings...even multiple times.)

Too expensive?  Don't buy it.  Or......wait a year or two until they hit the secondary market/auctions.  We have some old 'Snow Village' pieces (D56)....poorer artistic quality and hardly worth chump change nowadays. 

$2700 for a Lionel engine!!!!

And we're hardly at the endpoint, folks.  As they old cliche' goes....'You ain't seen nuttin' yet!'

In my opinion, Department 56 was a wonderful company when it was owned by the original partners. They sold out, the firm went public, and the new top management began to expand the product line and dealer network like crazy. This expansion was more than the market could support and collectors no longer could have it all for space and dollar considerations, and interest started to decline. It became a very slippery slope.

I am glad that at least the product does continue and Enesco has the resources to keep it going. Quality different, personally I don't see that. The product is pricy but in many ways still innovative. I would suggest that anyone who is interested in buying this product find a good dealer to work with and pricing will be a lot easier to take.

Seasons Bay, unfortunately a product ahead of it's time. Great product, but the consumers refused to support it probably because of the lack of a snow effect. This village also had the best accessories offered in pewter.

I have been around D56 since 1984 with the introduction of the Dickens Village. So I do have a little history to draw on.

I'm with Brian on this one. I have about 50 or so Snow Village buildings, which I began buying way back when Dept. 56 was just catching on as a hot collectible. I haven't added to the collection much in recent years, and just purchased one building all of last year (I tend to focus my collection these days on log-structure type buildings).

I have not noticed any decrease in quality, and feel that Dept. 56 items are still a cut above the lower cost competitors. I would be buying more Snow Village today, I imagine, but the simple fact is that I've run out of space for displaying them and that situation is not likely to change.