The Hamilton Collection - Are They Cheating Their Customers? -------------------------------------------------------------- by Simon Plumbe ----------------- Last year, a company called The Hamilton Collection released the first in a series of 8 collector plates in a 25th Anniversary set, featuring a painting of Spock by world renowned plate artist, Thomas Blackshear III. At the time of writing this (13th July 1992), there are four plates available - Spock, Kirk and McCoy, with Uhura being released shortly following their release in July 1991. However, a few months after the launch of the set, they also released a one-off 25th Anniversary plate with likenesses of ALL the cast plus the Enterprise. I was obviously pleased with the earlier plates so I ordered this extra piece. I rushed my orders to The Hamilton Collection in each case as each plate, including the 25th Anniversary special, was supposed to be limited to only 14 firing days and was obviously set to be a limited edition plate. You can obviously imagine my surprise when I received an advert from The Hamilton Collection on 10th March 1992 saying that as I was an owner of the 25th Anniversary plate, I was being offered the opportunity to purchase a set of 8 plates, starting with Spock! To reserve my order I had to reply by the end of March and the plates were a limited edition restricted to 14 firing days each (sound familiar?). To make it worse, they claimed that I was to be one of the first people to be offered a chance to buy this set, although I had owned the first plate in the series for over 6 months! Also, on the 20th June 1992, they decided to re-advertise the entire set in the national press! I don't quite believe that they have enough plates left over from the initial 14 firing days to cover all three advertising runs, do you? Everyone can understand a bit of marketing hype, but the adverts all stated that the plates were limited to 14 firing days and gives the impression that the plates are only going to be produced once. My co-producer on THE FINAL FRONTIER, Colin Gunn, has had a similarly unusual experience with them. Colin, as I had done, had ordered and received the Spock plate. When each plate is delivered, an order form for the next plate in the series, in this case Kirk, is enclosed. As I can imagine anyone with the first plate would, Colin sent his order off for Kirk along with a cheque. A few months passed and I had received my Kirk plate, an order form for McCoy and then the McCoy plate itself while Colin hadn't received either. He contacted the Hamilton Collection to find out what had happened to his order. They had found no record of his order, and to be fair, his cheque had not been banked, so in view of good customer relations The Hamilton Collection asked Colin to send another cheque and they would fire a Kirk plate especially for him. He has since received his plate (no doubt after the second production run of the plates) and it seems, in my opinion, that they did NOT produce a plate especially for Colin, but instead waited until the Kirk plate was re-issued and sent one from that batch. I contacted The Hamilton Collection to ask them why this was going on. This is their reply: "Thank you for your letter of 2nd July to us concerning the above subject. Firstly, no mention was made on any edition limitation in the ads we ran in the press (a `send no money now' offer). However, with the invoice that we sent out requesting payment, we do state that the plate is limited to fourteen firing days, and include the attached booklet which explains in some detail what a firing day actually is. The days do not have to be consecutive, and plates are indeed made to order (although it sometimes makes sense to batch orders to fill a kiln, but we do keep customers informed of any delay and we give them an unquestioned right to a full refund). This methodology has been studied and approved by the Advertising Standards Authority and we are by no means the only collector plate company that uses `Firing Days'. We actually launched the Spock plate and the 25th Anniversary Collage at the same time, after which we decided to concentrate on promoting the collage: thus, although Spock -had- been seen in one press ad, no-one else saw it until we mailed Spock to all Collage buyers. Thus it is actually true that Collage collectors were one of the first set of people to have the chance to buy Spock, although I must admit that you, as someone who already owned Spock, should not have been mailed - this is our error, and a wasted promotion! I hope this clarifies matters, but please ask me if you need further information from us. Yours sincerely Mark Dugdale Managing Director" After reading the booklet, I found that there were NO problems with the way in which they acted. However, when I first received Spock, neither myself OR Colin Gunn actually received a copy of said booklet (no doubt due to a small administrative error), and that it was this which lead to this article being written. Just to prove that they did explain everything, this is what the booklet had to say about Firing Days:- "Firing Days denotes that only a stated number of days will be allocated for `Firing' after which the moulds and production design will be `broken'. Plates limited by announced production periods, such as the number of firing days, are by far the most frequent ranging from less than one thousand to tens of thousands. In certain cases of exceptional worldwide demand edition sizes have been known to exceed one hundred thousand. It should also be noted that with this method of limitation, the number of firing days are not necessarily consecutive or within a stipulated time period; such editions may thus be spread and offered over a period of time. Therefore it is not uncommon to see a plate offered over a prolonged period following the first issue announcement. It does not mean that the `limitation' has been extended, because the pottery producing the edition is under an obligation to abide by the pre-arranged stated number of firing days." Many thanks must go to Tracy Barnes, Operations Director, and Mark Dugdale, Managing Director of The Hamilton Collection, for their assistance in producing this article. If you have something you think needs looking into, drop us a line and we'll try and feature it in the next issue.