Eaglemoss Collections
Eaglemoss Collections (also operating as Eaglemoss Ltd., Eaglemoss Publications Ltd., and the Eaglemoss Publishing Group Ltd., the latter two for print publications in particular) was a British publishing company that produced and marketed licensed magazines and collectibles, and had offices in London, New York, Moscow, Paris, São Paulo, and Warsaw.

Originating in 1975 with the release of its first collection, Eaglemoss Publications merged with GE Fabbri in 2011 and continued to focus on publishing partworks that encompassed a vast array of subjects. It had created and distributed more than 150 collections in thirteen different languages, in thirty markets, across five continents. With GE Fabbri came Ben Robinson, already a veteran of several Star Trek-related partworks, who, as senior project manager, would continue to do so for his newly coined employer, already the subsequent year with the Star Trek: The Official Starships Collection, the first such partwork published under the Eaglemoss brand.

It was owned by Eaglemoss Capital Ltd., a holding company comprised of private investors based in London and Paris.
The company marketed its product lines and subscriptions through its own international webshops and a wide range of other retailers.

On , the company was declared bankrupt,  ending its decade long association with the Star Trek franchise.

Hero Collector

Eaglemoss' science fiction, "genre", and pop culture collections, including its Star Trek books and products, were marketed under its Hero Collector publishing imprint and brand. Associated web portals and webshops were also operated under this trademark.

Noted Star Trek author Ben Robinson was the Editorial Manager of Global Developments for this imprint, and Chris J. Thompson, formerly of Titan, had been its Global Brand Manager.

Eaglemoss/Hero Collector had held licensing agreements with a number of entertainment companies, including 20th Century Fox/ (, The Orville, ), the BBC (Doctor Who), / (), DC Comics,  (), / (), Marvel,  (Stargate), Syfy/Amazon (), Universal Studios (, Battlestar Galactica), and  (, , , ), among others.

Bankruptcy
On , it was reported that Eaglemoss Ltd. filed a "Notice of Intention to appoint an administrator",  typically done under the UK Insolvency Act (meaning a company is no longer able to pay off its debts) to manage a company's affairs – and usually a prelude to either a change of ownership, or worse and more likely in this case (as it was also reported that the majority of the executive staff had already left the company for greener pastures elsewhere ), a bankruptcy potentially accompanied by a liquidation of assets – after almost all of Eaglemoss' worldwide customer service lines, webportals, and Facebook pages were suddenly disconnected, which also applied for some (but not all, see hereafter) of their product sites maintained by its Japanese licensee, De Agostini. It not only placed the future of the still running Star Trek: The Official Starships Collection, Star Trek Universe: The Official Starships Collection, Star Trek: Lower Decks The Official Starships Collection, and Star Trek: The Next Generation Build The USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D partworks into question, but that of all the company's other product lines as well, including their (Star Trek) book lines.   Customers who had taken out one, saw their subscriptions cancelled without any kind of notification, and were in general kept completely in the dark about the company's status. 

Ben Robinson, the project manager for the vast majority of the company's product lines, had already stopped communicating with the outside world the month before, which he had done profusely through his  previously. But on 8 August Robinson started tweeting again, clarifying that he was let go from the as of 5 August no longer existing company.  He also stated that he was in process of talking with third parties ostensibly "interested" in taking over some of the product lines with the buildup lines (such as the Build The USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D collection) given absolute priority, as Robinson "(...) hate[s] the thought of anyone being left with an incomplete model (...)", though conceding that he was unable to give any guaranties, merely that he was "hopeful" and "optimistic".  These actually might have included the aforementioned De Agostini licensee, as several of their official Eaglemoss product lines sites were still up and running by September 2022.

Robinson took it upon himself to try to make up for the complete lack of communication by Eaglemoss by giving several interviews to social media outlets,  as well as to Star Trek news sites, expressing his hopes for the future. In addition and even though he had not been part of the upper echelon management team, Robinson suspected that the company failed in the end because "(...) the owners of Eaglemoss pursued a strategy of very aggressive expansion and aggressive growth – with the intention of making the company as attractive to a potential buyer as possible. The way it feels to me is that they over-egged it."  



Star Trek licensing

Since 2012, Eaglemoss/Hero Collector has become one of the most prolific manufacturers of Star Trek collectibles ever, far outstripping its contemporaries by swiftly bringing quality products to market. 

Under a number of licenses from Paramount Consumer Products, its vast range of releases and frequent interactions with the online collecting community has made the company popular with adult collectors.

Miniatures
Market research conducted for predecessor company GE Fabbri's 2006 Star Trek: The Figurine Collection indicated that the public would be more interested in starship miniatures than character figurines and provided its successor, Eaglemoss, with the impetus to commission the The Official Starships Collection, which debuted in the UK in .

A side collection, called the Star Trek Starships XL Edition, exclusively comprised of larger models from the Official starship collection, premiered in the US in 2017. 

On , the company introduced the Star Trek: Discovery The Official Starships Collection partwork, which transitioned into the Star Trek Universe line in 2021, as is detailed below.

In Japan, many products from the Official and DIS starship lines have been released by De Agostini, another partwork publisher, under its own imprint.

Another monthly partwork, the Star Trek: The Official Busts Collection, premiered on , featured 4.5 to 6 inch-tall polyresin busts of a number of Star Trek characters, and concluded after the release of only twelve issues, reaffirming that interest in collectible Star Trek figurines was lackluster at best, as had already been established in 2006.

In June 2020 and in association with , the company debuted the Star Trek Online Starships Collection, which presented four to six-inch starship miniatures from Star Trek Online, the .

Similar to De Agostini's (short-lived) Japanese project, the company test-marketed the The Next Generation Build The USS Enterprise NCC-1701-D partwork in the UK and US in early 2019, which featured a 70 cm-long "build-your-own" electronic and die-cast metal USS Enterprise-D model kit. Following Eaglemoss' decision to retool the model before initializing subscriptions, the 120-stage partwork premiered in  (in the UK, US, and EU) and was shortly thereafter test-marketed in Japan by De Agostini.

Due to the lack of availability of new CG starship assets (as of July 2020), the production of ships from the third season of  was delayed, and resulted in the company's decision to suspend the DIS partwork after the release of (numbered) issue 33. In October 2020, Eaglemoss further reported that it planned to release more models from DIS in a future starship miniatures line, combined with ships from  and .  It was subsequently named the Star Trek Universe: The Official Starships Collection and launched to retail in March 2021. Additionally, large XL Edition models from DIS and PIC will continue as releases within the first (Official) starship partwork.

In , the company's project manager first indicated that the company intended to manufacture starships from  and the forthcoming untitled Section 31 series.  The company also confirmed that the first ships from its Star Trek: Lower Decks starships line would debut in .

Books
The book publishing division of the company – formally known as Eaglemoss Publications Ltd. – publishes the Star Trek: Designing Starships series of hardcover reference books, compiled from starship design articles in the starship collections' magazines and supplemented with new material.

Later mass-market versions of these books as well as the subsequent ("in-universe") Star Trek: Shipyards, Illustrated Handbook, and the Star Trek Celebration series were published by Eaglemoss, utilizing Penguin Random House's Publisher Services division for the production and distribution of titles, under the Eaglemoss/Hero Collector imprint. The arrangement is reminiscent of the one entered into by Midsummer Books Ltd. when they partnered up with Eaglemoss' predecessor GE Fabbri for the launch of the Star Trek Fact Files.

Largely based on material from the Star Trek Fact Files and subsequently updated and expanded, mass-market volumes of the comprehensive Illustrated Handbook reference book series are also in production.

Non-English editions of some of these books have also been published by Cross Cult, De Agostini, and Egmont/HarperCollins Publishers. Eaglemoss partnered with Simon & Schuster in 2018 for a contest to cross-promote the DIS partwork and the first three novels involving the series. 

Eaglemoss began to publish volumes of the Star Trek Graphic Novel Collection in . This series of hardcover books was composed of previously published Star Trek comic books from a wide range of publishers and ran for 150 issues. The company also collaborated with IDW to produce a variant edition of the Star Trek: Year Five, Issue 6 comic book in 2019.

The company published the Star Trek Nerd Search: Quibbles with Tribbles puzzle book in September 2020, and released the Star Trek Voyager: A Celebration, Mr. Spock's Little Book of Mindfulness, and Star Trek Cocktails books later in the year. The 2020 titles stood out as works that were not based on previously published works, but were rather original works conceived by the editorial staff of Eaglemoss. Following suit as such were Star Trek - The Original Series: A Celebration, Star Trek: The Next Generation Nerd Search: Bloopers of the Borg and Star Trek Discovery: The Book of Grudge, which saw publication in 2021. Creating Star Trek: The Next Generation: A Season by Season Companion – Season 1: 1987-1988, the first volume of a new reference series, was scheduled for release in 2022, but will most likely not see publication by Eaglemoss due to its bankruptcy – if at all.

The Star Trek reference books became the template, both for contents and format, for the company's similar works that explored other notable sci-fi franchises, most conspicuously Battlestar Galactica, , and the satirical Star Trek homage, Galaxy Quest, using the same publication and distribution methodology as utilized by their Star Trek counterparts.

Other products
From a new  series that encompasses a number of other licensed entertainment properties, the company plans to release the Star Trek: Borg Cube Advent Calendar in late . 

Through its webshops, Eaglemoss has retailed a number of Universe Publishing's Star Trek-themed calendars, including its groundbreaking Ships of the Line series.

In 2020, Eaglemoss' webshop began to retail Mego's Star Trek figures. It also markets a number of other Trek products, including art prints and posters, dedication plaques, kitchenware, barware, decor, clothing, apparel, key chains, pin badges, lapel pins, and a variety of other novelties.

Appendices

Footnotes

See also
 Star Trek starship miniatures
 Star Trek model kits

External links
  – defunct official international webshop
  – official collector portal (still live, but no longer maintained since 6 July 2022)
  – official Brazil webshop

Publishers
Collectible companies