Factory 'retooling' time for producing more sets?

jharrison · 2014-05-01T19:08:57.000Z

I often read speculation that TLG could just "produce more" of a set to meet demand. But does anyone know how much tooling is actually required for one of their factories to push out a specific set? I imagine they do a production run and by the time the sets hit the market the factory is already pushing out different sets. Let's assume that with the Minecraft set they were caught by surprise and decided another production run was necessary. There must be significant cost to retooling the factory (including the printing of boxes, instructions, etc.) to produce more of that Minecraft set, not to mention the downstream problem of impacting their production schedules. But the analysis would have shown them that the costs were worth it so they did it. But let's look at the SSD set (as an example of one that has been on the market a few years). I might be giving them more credit than is warranted, but given how well run they are and how accurate consumer spending analytics can be I would assume that if they had intended on another production run for the SSD that it would have already happened. They wouldn't have allowed it to go "out of stock / sold out" as they did in North America. Based on this I'm guessing that the SSD is done and we're seeing the last remnants work their way through the retail channels Or maybe I'm wrong and they have a lot of fluidity to their manufacturing process that allows them to react to the market very quickly and they only plan a few months ahead?