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Tokyo Mint Launches Statue Line

posted on by Christopher Macdonald
A new company on the block, Tokyo Mint, launches with a Naru Narusegawa statue, the first in a series of Love Hina statues.

Tokyo Mint will be importing 600 limited edition Naru Narusegawa statues from Japan as the first item in their Love Hina line-up. The statues are being manufactured by Epoch, the same company that previously manufactured them for the Japanese market, and the entire run is being shipped to Tokyo Mint for sale in North America.

Tokyo Mint will not be selling the products directly themselves. Milton Griepp explains, "Our minimum order size will probably be too large for most retailers." The models will ship 4 to a case, with a suggested retail price of $129.00.

Tokyo Mint was originally looking to license the Love Hina property and produce their own models, but in the process of license/product research they found that Epoch had already created a high quality product for the Japanese market and decided to approach Epoch about having the product manufactured for North America.

Tokyo Mint started looking into the model license for the very popular Love Hina title over a year ago and will now be looking to aquire model licenses for other titles with "a lot of fan interest." They are open to either manufacturing their own models or using existing models previosuly manufactured for other markets; they will make the decision on case per case basis.

Milton Griepp, who is one of the owners of Tokyo Mint is also the owner of ICv2.

Tokyo Mint has reserved the domain name tokyomint.com, but there is no website present yet.

About the Naru Narusegawa Model (Excerpts from press release):

In 2002, the property was launched in America, with the manga released by Tokyopop, the anime on DVD by Bandai, and posters from 1000 Editions. Now Tokyo Mint, LLC, a new company specializing in fine anime collectibles, will be making high quality collectible statues available to North American fans.

The first release is a 1/8th scale rendition of Love Hina character Naru Narusegawa, in a limited North American edition of 600 cold cast statues scheduled for release in December, 2002. Each statue is carefully packaged for safe transit in an attractive color box. Suggested retail price is $129. More statues in the series are planned for release in 2003.


· Limited to an edition of 600 for North America.
· Cold cast 1/8 scale statue, hand painted, complete.
· 8” tall by 5” deep, including base.
· $129.00 srp
· fully packaged in an attractive color box.
· Box dimensions 12.5” tall x 7 “ deep x 7.75” wide
· Sculptor is ZERO.
· 4 per case.

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