THE KOLLECTORIUM STANDARD

A sixth-scale figure passes through a lot of hands before it lands on a shelf, and every single one of them names it differently. The factory prints one title. The retailer writes another. The box says a third. The community invents a fourth over a long weekend. Multiply that by a hundred-plus manufacturers across three decades and you get the natural state of this hobby: beautiful, beloved, and completely un-searchable.

So the real thing we make is not a list of figures. It is the quiet discipline that gets those figures to agree with each other, so a search finds every version of a character, a maker's output actually adds up, and two listings for the same piece are recognisably the same piece. This page is that discipline, written down, because a method you cannot explain is just a pile of opinions.

Every figure settles into a single canonical record with a permanent home (a URL that never changes on it). Duplicates get gathered in rather than left to breed: the same release re-listed under a translated title, a retailer's SKU, or a fond nickname all fold back into that one record. And we keep the maker's original product name too, so nothing precious is lost in the tidying.

Two fields, kept deliberately apart, do most of the heavy lifting. One holds the clean character, the thing a person would actually call it. The other holds the full figure name, version and all, the thing that tells this release apart from its siblings.

When a maker ships an official name in another language, we keep the original right there on the record, so a 303 Toys 關羽 stays findable as 關羽 and as Guan Yu. The collector who searches in the maker's language deserves the archive just as much as the one who searches in English.

A character is not a scrap of text repeated on figures. It is an identity. Every Iron Man, from any studio, in any armour, links back to one canonical Iron Man, which is exactly how a character page can gather every version ever made in one glorious place. A figure can also carry secondary characters (a two-pack, a hero and their companion) and its own variant (the specific suit, costume or era), so duos and hybrids sit in one honest place instead of three wrong ones.

This is the one that quietly ruins most catalogues, and we will die on this hill. An edition is a tier of the same release: Standard, Deluxe, Exclusive, the convention-only colourway. A variant is a different version of the character: a new armour mark, a battle-damaged sculpt, a season-two costume. They are not the same axis, and mashing them together means “Deluxe” ends up filed next to “Mark 7” as though they were the same kind of thing. They are not.

Franchise is the umbrella IP (Marvel, DC, Star Wars). Media is the specific film, show or game the figure came from (Avengers: Endgame, The Mandalorian, Elden Ring), and we never leave it blank, because “which movie is this from” is exactly what a collector wants to filter by. Figures that belong to no single IP still get an honest home: anonymous soldiers land under a Military umbrella, athletes under Sports, gods and heroes under Myths & Legends, rather than being wedged into a franchise they were never part of.

A large and frankly fascinating slice of this hobby is “third-party”: studios that sculpt a recognisable character under a coded name to step around licensing. We document them exactly as they are printed and exactly as they are recognised. The coded name is preserved, the real character it depicts is identified, and the figure is tagged to the franchise it plainly belongs to. You find it either way. Nothing is hidden, and nothing is invented.

Scale is normalised to a fixed vocabulary (1/6, 1/4, 1/12, and friends) so filters actually mean something. SKUs are split into a stable base and its variant suffix so a product line stays together. The physical form is typed (figure, bust, prop replica) so a search for figures returns figures. Release dates are real and researched, never guessed: an unknown date is left honestly unknown rather than filled in with a plausible lie. And every record carries a verification state, so the archive can tell you how sure it is instead of pretending.

Kollectorium is an independent, editorial reference archive. It documents figures. It does not manufacture, sell, license, endorse, or officially represent any figure, manufacturer, character or franchise. Cataloguing a product here is not promotion of it, affiliation with its maker, or a claim on anyone's rights. It is documentation, the same as a library cataloguing a book it did not write.

All product names, character names, franchise names, logos and trademarks belong to their respective owners. They appear here nominatively, for identification, reference and commentary, which is what makes an archive an archive. No affiliation with or endorsement by Hot Toys or any other rights holder is claimed or implied.

The marketplace is peer-to-peer: sales and trades happen directly between collectors, and Kollectorium is not the seller, the importer, or a party to those transactions. The compiled catalogue itself is a curated database and is protected as such (including under the EU Database Directive). And if you are a rights holder with a question about how something is represented, please just write to us. We would genuinely rather get it right than be right.