A curious mystery

I was taking a new photo of one of my older Breyer models yesterday, and was reminded of the strange fact which came to light back when I bought her. And I thought it's just the kind of thing people on here might find mildly interesting to read about.

Here is the horse in question...

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I bought her in 2006, from one of the online UK Breyer stockists at the time, brand new in her box, so I know she was imported and sold as the 2004-2006 regular run Appaloosa Sport Horse, and sold for about £25 cos that's what this scale cost at the time.

Also in 2004, Breyer released an exclusive special run for the JC Penney Holiday catalogue, known as the Black Tie Affair set. They did these matching trios several years in a row, always a family group of the same breed, nationality, or colour in common. These were only available in the USA and through this one company, and were only sold as a set, not individual models. So there's really no way any one from the trio should have ended up in a regular run box, and shipped out to England for individual sale cheaply.
Here's the IdentifyYourBreyer shot of the JCP models.

The Appaloosa Sport Horse release and the Black Tie Affair mare are very alike, but different enough that you can tell which is which. Look here, at another of IdentifyYourBreyer's handy photos - the one on the left is Black Tie Affair, and has brownish hint to her colour, more white patches to her stencilled pattern, and coloured eyes. The regular run on the right is an unshaded jet black, has less patches on her rump, and her eyes have a little white highlight but no brown colour.

IdentifyYourBreyer says that some of the later JCP sets included the regular run mare. Plain black, less appaloosa pattern, plain eyes. I'd understand if I'd bought the set, and my mare turned out to be the normal one - it's a known issue.
But no. I definitely bought the normal one. I wouldn't even know HOW to buy from JC Penney in the UK, and anyway I can remember exactly what UK toyshop company I got the model from (even that it was a special offer at the time : buy two get one free, and I bought this Appaloosa mare, the Lone Ranger's Silver, and chose the Showjumping Warmblood as my freebie - I repainted him as my first ever large scale custom)

So somehow, I got a special run in the packaging of a regular run, for the price of a regular run, from a shop which could only have thought they were stocking the regular run.

And this makes me wonder....could this be the never-admitted reason some of those later Black Tie Affair sets were packed with the special run stallion, special run foal, and the regular run mare? Because they'd accidentally shipped the special run mares off in the wrong packaging in the meantime, and only realised the mistake when they came to box up another batch for JC Penney?

I don't mind not getting what I ordered, by the way - and actually I prefer the one I ended up with, as I like that hint of warmth in her paint colour, and I like the added detail of her brown eyes

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That is a case for Sherlock Holmes

I suppose you will never be able to comfirm your theory, but it sounds right to me

Yes, it seems quite plausible that it was a mistake while packaging the model. I believe those mistakes are rare but the important is that you're happy at the end.

That's wild!! And so lucky for you, haha. I think your clue here really does suggest that the two go swapped somehow in the packaging process. It makes some degree of sense given their visual similarity. It makes you wonder how many moving parts there are in a Breyer release. It would be cool to be able to reach out to the Breyer hobby world in general and ask if anyone else found the same thing. Have you ever done so?

Congrats anyway on not only a cool story and a clue to a mystery, but also on getting the lovely special run at a regular run price!

I'm glad it's not just me who finds this sort of thing interesting

Jill wrote:

It would be cool to be able to reach out to the Breyer hobby world in general and ask if anyone else found the same thing. Have you ever done so?

I remember discussing it on a UK forum at the time, a couple of other collectors I knew who had the same horse went and checked theirs, and found they were the real regular runs with less blanket pattern - but neither of them ordered from the same place as me, and had both owned their mares a couple of years longer, so it wasn't a true like-for-like comparison.
And I was never on the big well-known international model horse forums to get a bigger range of opinion, I was always put off by how cliquey and elitist the hobby can be, and preferred to stick to smaller communities where I could keep out of all that. The model horse hobby's got some really wonderful, friendly, creative people - all of the very closest and longest friendships I have in my life came about through model horses, people I met when we were in our teens or still at school - but it's also renowned for it's deep and long-standing problem with bitchiness and backstabbing and shunning people who don't fit in or want the same things out of it. Which, guess what, is very very like the real horse world.
So I tend to hover on the outskirts and avoid the drama and do my own thing, it's just not worth the stress

But if it was a packing mistake, it would've been a whole batch, so there must have been others out there who got a slightly different horse than they ordered. Perhaps they just didn't notice, or maybe just thought 'Cool, this looks better than the catalogue photo' and assumed everybody got a more detailed model And if they were buying in person in tack shops or toy shops rather than ordering online, they might never even have seen the catalogue image at all.

George wrote:

And I was never on the big well-known international model horse forums to get a bigger range of opinion, I was always put off by how cliquey and elitist the hobby can be, and preferred to stick to smaller communities where I could keep out of all that. The model horse hobby's got some really wonderful, friendly, creative people - all of the very closest and longest friendships I have in my life came about through model horses, people I met when we were in our teens or still at school - but it's also renowned for it's deep and long-standing problem with bitchiness and backstabbing and shunning people who don't fit in or want the same things out of it. Which, guess what, is very very like the real horse world.
So I tend to hover on the outskirts and avoid the drama and do my own thing, it's just not worth the stress

I understand and agree 100%, hahaha. I'm not in any of them either or I would offer to ask for you. I'm just on a Facebook sales group, and it has enough drama as it is.