P is for . . . No! Absolutely Not! W is for Wenno!

I shot all these in Smyths and wondered if Wenno was an in-house or phantom brand for Smyths, but a quick Google revealed they are a 2014-founded anglicised subsidiary of Shing Hing who's SH marked Matchbox copy 'Army man' tub we saw here a few years ago, also found in Smyths, so there's that! And we've seen two of them before, in another store.

These are not the same as the ones in the tub (next, below), and may have been around for a while, as I know I've had some come in, in mixed lots/donations, the larger pigs for certain, and it's a traditional cheapie in sense that there's quite a bot of duplication in the bag, but not many sculpts; 5 or 6, 6 or seven 7? But reasonably decorated compared to the old rack-toy farm stuff of yesteryear!

 

These are larger, and more like the Peterkin's we looked at the other day, with the larger scale poultry and rabbits etc. Of interest, and another similarity with Peterkin, is the use of smaller unpainted animals in with the larger one.

I'm sure I'm not the only one, who, on glancing at something on eBay or at a show, and deciding it's needed for the collection, have got it home,/had it delivered, only to find it's a piece of shite, and that I already have a better one? Well, that's because when you're scrolling dozens of tables at a show or hundreds of eBay or auction lots, you are visually overloading your brain, and snap decisions are made without the full facts.

It would seem the latest thing going round the cheapo-toy factories of China is to fill the tubs, buckets and header-carded bags with a few big animals/dinosaurs and a bunch of small ones, to overload the casual browser, in order to get them to think the contents are better than they might be, and take them to the till!

 

Obviously a tropical farm with those palm-trees!

The above two sets were seen in B&M over last Christmas and posted in another lot of shelfies, back in February, but here they are again, further proving the independence of the brand (mused upon then, too), and still looking reasonable, if not decorated to the same standard as the Schliech they were placed near! But then, at 12-quid, you'd be lucky to get two of Schleich's!

 

A couple of aisles over, and in the same line as the farm tub, was this set of dinosaurs, also looking quite similar in contents to the Peterkin set the other day, and other's we've seen shelfied here in the past, Tesco supermarkets carried a tub like this a few years ago, if I recall well? It has one huge dino', several middle-sized ones and more undecorated 'mini' fillers.