ON THE SURFACE, the firing of top creative talent at the pioneering screen-printing-and-more business Mondo is a typical Spaghetti Western American business story, with a squeegee tucked into a holster. There’s good, bad, and ugly. Only in this case, there’s a lot of ugly, beginning with the question of how the dumping of millions of toys in a landfill may or may not be connected to the layoffs. Any of you creative types building a business might not enjoy how this movie plays out, nor the ugly truths it reveals about how people’s lives can be thrown about like a spoiled child’s toys. Nonetheless, it’s got great characters and timeless themes of plucky workers vs corporate overlords.
The story began last year, when large conglomerate Funko purchased Mondo for $14 million. Funko is the company behind the “Pop!” line of bobbleheads. It also makes plushies, apparel, board games and more. In fact, the company claims to be the world’s largest proprietor of product licenses, having inked deals with organizations ranging from Disney, Warner Bros., and Lucasfilm to Blizzard Entertainment, the NFL, and the NBA.
By the time of the acquisition, Mondo had been doing its best to keep Austin, Texas, weird for more than 20 years since breaking out of a kiosk in the lobby of the Alamo DraftHouse Cinema (a movie theater franchise that declared bankruptcy in 2021). Mondo revolutionized the local and national rock poster market when it branched into creating and marketing retro and modern movie posters, followed by vinyl records, toys, and more. By the time of the layoffs, the company had grown locally to 40 employees; built a worldwide sales base; developed a reputation for supporting both emerging and established artists; and produced some of the best screen-printed art of the past decade.
At first, good vibes prevailed. Tim League, Alamo Drafthouse founder and executive chairman, said in a statement, “Over the past few months, we searched exhaustively to find a perfect partner who saw what was unique and special about Mondo and was in a position to meaningfully invest in Mondo, nurture the team, and further its reach and vision. Funko is exactly that unicorn.” He added, “The team that made Mondo amazing is staying together, making the transition to Funko, and will continue their same work with the same creative vision.”
For its part, Funko had received a fistful of investment dollars only a month before – nearly a quarter-billion in fact, all paid by an investment group in exchange for a 25-percent share in the company. Nonetheless, Funko went on to report a $47 million quarterly loss. The company responded by jettisoning inventory, writing off a reported $36 million worth of plastic “collector” toys and dumping them in a landfill. Then, on March 24 – after the loss and the toy burial, and only nine months after the acquisition – Funko fired the “team that made Mondo amazing.”
That team – including Rob Jones, Mitch Putnam, and Eric Garcia – had built the company up from nothing to make it a game-changer in the printed collector poster market. After the layoffs, Funko became an instant pariah on social media. Artist Todd Slater spoke for many in the rock poster world in a Facebook post: “Still shocking to read this. The end of an era. Rob Jones & crew set the HIGHEST bar for silkscreened art & to see it taken away while they continue to sell out editions is gut wrenching. It took Funko 9 months to DESTROY something these people built over the last 20 years. ”
A week after the layoffs, Funko CEO Brian Mariotti released this statement: “Funko has been obsessed with Mondo and the amazing products that they produce for years. We believe Mondo is a pop-culture tastemaker and always has their finger on the pulse of everything that is cool. Since there is a lot of misinformation about the recent change in leadership and the poster division of Mondo currently out there, I can tell you that our strategy is very clear – While we did reduce our overall workforce by about 10 percent across Funko, the majority of the company-wide layoffs weren’t in Mondo.”
Ah, but layoffs included the creative people who built Mondo, and who had the trust of the artists, the printers, and the fans who purchased the products.
Mariotti also responded to initial reports that Mondo’s poster division was done. He stated: “The Mondo posters business will continue, period. We feel that making extremely limited runs of posters, most of which are 150 pieces or under, limits access to fans unfairly. Many of these posters are bought with the sole purpose of flipping them at a much higher cost to fans that really want them. The posters are created by some of the most amazing artists working today. Our goal is to make larger edition size runs (limited but not ultra-limited) that allow more fans to participate in this world-class expression of pop culture art. We also believe that broadening the pop-culture scope to include TV properties, sports, anime, and music will have an amazing appetite from Mondo fans and pop-culture fans alike.”
I’m not fluent in corpo-speak, but it sounds to me like Funko wants to get rid of the integrity needed to maintain the limited-edition values and flood the market, plus junk it up with flavor-of-the-day crap from their other licensees. This is from the brain trust that just buried 30 million toys that nobody wanted.
Another statement from Mariotti about provides an inkling of what else was in play. As he explains the new plan, it sounds like the company may be kissing Austin goodbye: “We currently have plans to build an almost 70,000-square-foot record pressing factory meets record store of the future meets live music event space in San Diego,” the statement reads. “The space will have a 4000-square-foot dedicated Mondo art gallery as part of the vision.”
Mariotti concluded, “We are 100 percent committed to providing all the support we possibly can for the folks at Mondo, so they can continue to make amazing products that reach a larger and more diverse Fanbase through expanded licenses, better distribution, and a better overall experience for their fans.”Given what we saw go down in the past few weeks, it sounds like any remaining Mondo employees might be moving, or taking that “support” down to the unemployment office.
We’ve already seen this story play out in the textile world. The last 5-10 years have seen the proliferation of online mega-print operations. They hustle cheap contract printers, sell through various entities, and set up their own large production firms on the backs of feeder websites who rip off original art and print digital and screen-printing reproductions. Lately, the larger production shops have been going down. Meanwhile, the small shops they undercut go out of business too, and everyone loses their job. Apparently, this is now spilling into the collector poster and record side of the business. I don’t want to sound like a communist, but it’s the creatives and the workers who always lose. The suits and the shareholders make their escape.