A heads up to our 3A Transformers product fans out there – there is a shake up with the companies that make them. Rest assured all product, in production or not, will be made and shipped. The license will also continue beyond that under a new company name. But things are changing.
3A was a joint collaboration between Ashley Wood, the artist, and Kim Fung Wong. They originally created toys based on the worlds and art of Ashley Wood. Kim Fung Wong eventually created a sister company, ThreeZero, to manufacture non Ashley Wood product. They have been running side by side for a while. Over time, due to the ins and outs of licensing deals, 3A also got into producing items that weren’t Ashley Wood specific. Including Transformers.
Last night, Ashley Wood announced that 3A would be shutting down, and the Transformers and Destiny licenses will be transferred to ThreeZero. All Bambaland.com and Worldof3a.com orders will be filled and honored. Future pre-orders, customer service and the like will be handled by ThreeZero.
In reality, nothing is changing but the logo on the box as far as we can tell. However, for those interested or with outstanding pre-orders, we suggest checking out the following links to get informed. You can also read on to check the details out.
We wish all parties the best of luck in their new adventures and hope the Transformers product keeps coming!
Notice about 3A brand:
Moving forward, all 3A branded licenses like Transformers and Destiny 2 will be produced and distributed by Threezero and carry the Threezero brand. Future pre-orders will be placed through https://www.threezerohk.com
All pre-orders made through https://www.bambaland.com and https://www.WO3A.com will be honored by Threezero.
Beginning from August 1st, 2019 3A will close its online store for pre-orders. Please refer to https://www.threezerohk.com/shipping-schedule/ for the latest shipping schedule.
Please direct any questions about your orders to [email protected]
Thank you for following 3A for over 10 years!
Items listed below will be shipped in August 2019:
・3AGO Bomb V2 Square set – early Aug
・3AGO Clear Square R1 set – early Aug
・LAST STAND YAMA ULTRA TK – ONLINE EDITION – early Aug
・SMIRKING MASTER ONE JODAN ULTRA TK – early Aug
・Bot Club | Desert Stroll Bot – end of Aug
・8” ASHTRO LAD – WAVE2 | MOON WATCH – end of Aug
・8” ASHTRO LAD – WAVE2 | LOCAL GUARDIAN – end of Aug
The era of 3A is coming to a close. Kim and I are forging ahead in different directions. I wish Kim nothing but the best on the journey he is taking Threezero in and I’m grateful to have spent so many years in the trenches with the man. I’m proud of what 3A has produced and accomplished these 11 years. It’s been a sincere honor and privilege to work with all of the 3A crew, past and present. My journey, my art, and my worlds, however, are heading towards new frontiers with head held high and brush in hand.
And to the fans – Thank you. 3A could not have been what it was without you.
Rest assured – this is not the end, it’s another beginning. The band remains the same, only the label is changing.
See you in the Underverse.
– Ash
Going forward all 3A branded licenses like Transformers and Destiny 2 will be produced and distributed by Threezero and carry the Threezero brand. Future pre-orders will be placed through threezerohk.com.
All pre-orders made through Bambaland.com and WO3A.com will be honored by Threezero.
Beginning August 1st, 2019 3A will close it’s online store for pre-orders. Please refer to https://www.threezerohk.com/shipping-schedule/ for the latest shipping schedule.
Please direct any questions about your orders to [email protected]
Thank you all for over a decade of love and support!
– The 3A Team
Bob 121
Funnily enough, long time 3A members miss those random surprise drops. There's especially been "F5 warriors" reminiscing now that the company is dead.
I'm sure you can find the interview if you are part of any 3A groups. It was such a big deal at the time that 3A actually put out an official statement trying to tell people it was misunderstood when they saw everyone freaking out because it really was the first time they started to admit the company was pretty much dead.
Nah, the TF line probably kept them afloat much longer than they should have been. This has been a very long time coming for every reason other than the TFs.
Digger
I don’t agree with him all the time, but that seems entirely understandable.
primalxconvoy
Thanks for that. It's not a sign of troubled global economies then.
primalxconvoy
Indeed it does. I didn't know the person arguing against me was in that position. However, them simply replying "no" didn't exactly help matters.
primalxconvoy
It might have helped their argument if they had disclosed said title at the beginning?
primalxconvoy
Me? Apologies if I defined them wrong. I am not so familiar with them.
Shepard Prime
Yup. I always end up finding out about his big art collection volumes after the fact and they all get sold out.
Shepard Prime
I appreciate it nonetheless. I'm a big fan of his work but I've been out of the loop (roughly around the time period you're talking about hence why this is all news to me) save for the occasional news update from forums or just checking out his various sites to see if anything's new coming out from him.
Some of what you're talking about with 3A goes for his comics as well. Tons of ideas…none of them finished. And it's annoying when you're really into his stuff (WWR, Popbot and ZvR for starters) only to be left hanging. And its
Edit:
Hit the post button sorry.
doubly frustrating i imagine when you're putting in the kind of money that 3A figs go for only to wonder are you going to finish the set.
Re: the fetishes. I googled it. The Fang Gals are a bit too much but the World of Isabella Pascha seemed to have more to it.
I can see him closing 3A even if he still intends to pursue making figs. Doing it somewhere other than 3A might give him more flexibility and freedom (and possibly cheaper) than how he's doing it now.
If you have a link to that interview with Kim I'd love to read it.
And thanks again for the in-depth recap!
Subotnik
The thing that used to annoy me most About 3A back in the day were the sudden, random preorder announcements where you pretty much had to have hundreds of dollars burning a hole in your pocket at all times if you wanted to buy something in the handful of minutes before it sold out.
Even if you had the money it was still annoyingly difficult to actually get something in your cart and purchased due to the load on the store. I’ve never had such a hard time trying to give a company money.
Bob 121
Over the past few years the 3A fanbase essentially came to terms with the company peaking around 2013-2014 and then dropping off at 2015 and only getting worse. This began when Ash started constantly flaunting new ideas and never going anywhere with them. Before we had seen someone who was passionate and creative and ambitious in bringing his ideas to the physical world. Then we got dozens of different focal points in his universe that had these backstories and lore behind them and when he said he would do something with all that he failed to follow it up. It went from great times to questionable priorities and delay after delay to him being straight up childish and immature and insulting his own fans quite a bit.
So around that 2014-2015 mark it was overbearing on fans that had been around since 2008-2012 and pretty soon started lowering expectations and you could see communities splintering into trying to decide whether to give up and move on or stay and try to be hopeful despite to vocal pessimism. Now Ash was never good at PR to begin with so you could imagine when his fans got upset he got defensive.
In addition to this, he started to shift 3As focus around so much it really got screwy. The main scale was pushed to the backseat in favor of a smaller, more affordable line which ended up being cut up between 3As online store and retail stores. It was pretty confusing to figure out where to buy everything if it wasn't canceled in the first place. Last year we got an interview with Kim (who manages Threezero and let Ash make 3A, Ash + Threezero is 3A) who said after 10 years it was inevitable that Ash runs out of inspiration, and was preoccupied with his comics and other things.
Now for the fetish part (and this is where he lost me personally look up Fang Gals and Paschas), he went hard pushing this the last few years. He has always drawn some vulgar and explicit stuff, and with that came nudity. Lots of female private parts exposed in his drawings. But then it crossed into the three dimensional space. We had some extremely large bondage figures. A female Darth Vader with a dildo. Some very large feet – not figure accessories, literally just big dismembered feet with shoes on them. And speaking of jointless statues, the infamous Fang Gals had countless repaints when they were just massive statues of amputee women that had massive boobs and exposed everything. He even at one point said he wanted to make a giant Pascha doll with a real vagina that you "could put shit in".
TLDR:
Long story short he roped in a bunch of people across the world with his great ideas of this crazy robot war and then as his ideas got bigger so did his ego, and with that, I personally feel his creativity took a dive and he gave in to the classic artists lack of filter. Which is fine, just dont try to run a business with that. He dragged 3As dead body through the mud for a few years now IMO and it should have been shut down years ago. It's not that people weren't buying his stuff, it's that he wasn't producing anything. So now we're at this weird point where everyone is trying to act cool about this and some people even still think Ash is going off to make his own figures somewhere else. If that was the case, what's the point in shutting down 3A?
Damn what a long rant. I'm personally a little sad to see it go because 3A made a lot of the most creative and artistic stuff I have, but yeah, this closure has been in the works for a while.
Shepard Prime
Explain?
Bob 121
For sure. But even the BB movie deluxe Prime has 53 POA, and the recent TLK prime has 99. Good luck getting Hasbro/Takara to cramp that into a transforming figure, even including transforming joints.
Digger
I was gonna say him yeah. He’s definitely got one of the highest parts counts in terms of transforming figures. And easily has some of the best design and engineering. Almost comparable to similar super robot figures who don’t transform.
Rodimus Prime
The forum post equivalent of
View attachment 28345525
Bob 121
Can you name a single transforming TF with as many POA / moving parts as a 3A figure? I'm trying to think of even the new sunbow slave designs with a million panels and I don't think so. I would say MP-44 might but we can't know until the end of the month.
djmajin
Also facepalm at the fact that he kept referring to them as “statues” when these are usually more poseable and have more articulation than most hastak transformers…
Prob a pathetic attempt to troll lol
Bob 121
TLDR someone posts a post where every single word is wrong.
Digger
Except not at all?
Requiem Prime
So the difference between them had eroded over the years to in name only. Makes sense they take the final step and drop the redundancy.
Everything Man
TLDR; company learns that Transformers are suppose to transform.