CHAPTER THREE: OF DINOSAURS AND AUCTION-DEALING

In the meantime, Mold-A-Rama Inc. has been working on projects behind the scenes.

One trick the company has learned, for example, is using eBay to gauge how much it should sell certain figures for. Sometimes, on the online store, the company chooses to market a set of souvenirs the machines have not produced in decades. To estimate how much customers are willing to pay, Mold-A-Rama Inc. turns to eBay, putting one model at a time up for auction and taking note of the patterns in prices. This way, the company can turn a maximum profit without alienating its customers, to begin with.

In addition, the company has gotten a chance to take extra focus on new molds that it had previously not gotten much time to work on. For example, the company had been working with the Field Museum to create a mold based on a statue at the Field Museum of a Quetzalcoatlus (a large pterosaur). Because of Quetzalcoatlus’s size and unique features, translating it into a mass-produced mold was proving difficult. During quarantine, the company was able to refocus itself on the project and left a new artist at the helm of making the mold. The new mold was finally able to be completed and now is up for sale at the recently-reopened Field Museum. 

The company has also focused itself on new technologies such as 3D imaging to create new molds and products. This has led Mold-A-Rama Inc. to be able to create molds that were previously too difficult to make. For example, originally, the machines had a set of dinosaur molds that premiered at the 1964 World’s Fair for the Sinclair Dinoland attraction. However, the molds were big and unwieldy and proved cumbersome to work with. So, to work with the issue, new molds were created that served as smaller replicas of the originals. These molds are still used today, and can still be purchased at machines like the ones that operate in the basement of the Field Museum. One mold, unfortunately, proved near-impossible to replicate- the Ankylosaurus. For decades it remained untouched, resulting in the Dinosaur set of Mold-A-Rama machines being something of a Missing Man Formation. However, thanks to the 3D imaging the company has worked on during COVID-19, the Ankylosaurus will finally be able to be produced in a smaller size later this year, and will- after nearly half a century- rejoin its waxy siblings.