Vinegar Syndrome and Their Partner Labels

[yoloswegmaster]

VS announced that they will be releasing Trey Parker's Cannibal! The Musical, hours after a label in the UK called Refuse Films had announced their release. Interestingly, they emailed Diabolik, Grindhouse, and Orbit to tell them not to import and stock the latter release.

The guy who runs Grindhouse confirmed in this video (starting from the 39 minute mark) that because of this hullabaloo, VS/OCN created a new policy that if a third-party retailer were to stock a competing release of a title that VS released/are releasing, then they won't be selling the LE titles to the retailers. Starting from now, it looks like Grindhouse won't be stocking any of the LE releases from VS (and I'm presuming the same for the partner labels). He also pointed out how it was a bit hypocritical for VS to ask them to not stock the Eureka release of Tank Girl but allow them to stock the Umbrella release simply because they are one of the partner labels.

[domino harvey]

I understand if Orbit et al can’t financially afford to tell Vinegar Syndrome to fuck off, but I hope they all do

[dwk]

Some more from Mike from Grindhouse (posts from the Vinegar Syndrome thread at Blu-ray.com's forum)

OK, so some clarification on some things from last night's live show.

OCN is the wholesale distributor for VS and their partner labels. OCN gives smaller retailers access to the VS and partner labels products at wholesale pricing. This is usually 50% off MSRP - not what VS is selling them for. Within the past few years that 50% pricing has dropped to 40-45% for limited editions. This seems small but it makes it very difficult to make any money especially when VS does such a good job at direct to consumer sales.

The reason for standing up to this new rule of theirs is the fact that - Cannibal The Musical for example - I currently have 120 pre-orders for the Refuse release. I have NEVER sold 120 pre-orders for ANY VS title. Ever. They also limit the amount of product we can order through OCN. So there would never be a title I could pre-sell 120 copies of. In fact, For Cannibal, the pre-order wasn't made available to the retailers until a day and a half after the announcement of all the titles. It was almost sold out by the time I placed my order (which they cancelled). If I followed their rules and didn't carry the Refuse release I would have lost a considerable amount sales on the import and still only gotten about 30 of the VS LE to sell.

TLDR: VS is hard to sell for us and imports are a large % of our business

The wholesale site has limits of 30 per title.

I WISH we made that much on each title. Usually our profit margin (selling at the regular prices VS sells them for) is about $6 for a slipcover version and maybe $10 for a box release. Sometimes our profit margin was as little as $3 selling them at the regular VS pricing.

[ryannichols7]

I am obviously late to this, but I (no surprise!) heavily enjoyed Mike's rant a lot, and his posts since. he had me until he started trashing 4K, but otherwise I'm glad to stand with him against this evil empire. I was glad to see the tide on the other forum turn a little bit after previously, the devotees there sided with VS over the Cannibal! The Musical case. I'm thankful people are starting to come around and not see VS as this struggling little company. they're clearly in this to continue to do all the wrong things...

I understand if Orbit et al can’t financially afford to tell Vinegar Syndrome to fuck off, but I hope they all do

I hope Orbit joins Grindhouse on this one. Marc's comments before kinda implied he's in agreement, but I don't want to take words out of his mouth at all. I love that Mike specifically called out the Tank Girl release and their hypocrisy with Umbrella, and let alone mentioning they support "film lovers" and the Indie stores or whatever, but you don't see them refusing to sell their products on Amazon even though I can easily import just about any disc I want to through Amazon...who VS will send pallets of standard editions to, when all is said and done.

I feel like Orbit do better business selling VS titles, they do get a fair amount of LE's after the fact - I picked up Speaking Parts there after it was cleared off the VS website quickly, for example. but I can't imagine the margins are high enough versus carrying the Second Run edition of Interrogation, for example

[Matt]

Judging from the latest Orbit newsletter, it seems like they might have worked out a little quid-pro-quo deal with VS. They seem to be getting a fair number of the LE releases to stock and a 30% off sale for the last half of December (while VS titles are otherwise unavailable direct). I honestly can't blame these small operations for doing what makes sense for them. I like supporting Orbit because they ship quickly and with good packaging and usually carry everything that I want.