Founded by Akira Yamaguchi in 2000 in Suwa City, PM Office A was originally not a player in the hobby game. Yamaguchi, based on his experiences at Seiko Epson and other plastic manufacturing companies, originally intended the company to focus on making plastic parts for cameras, automobiles and other boring non-toy appliances.
Well, someone’s got to do the job, and those guys are the real heroes.
However, the 2008 economic crisis would hit PM Office A pretty badly. With automotive parts orders reducing as a result, Yamaguchi needed a new revenue stream to save his company. As luck would have it, he would attend a hobby event where he would take notes on just how popular hobby goods were, realising that in the absence of his usual revenue streams, getting in on the expanding hobby market might save his company.
In 2010, Yamaguchi would launch PLUM (Pretty Lovely Unique Mechanism) to start working on bishoujo figures and other hobby products, giving back to the city that had supported PM Office A by making merchandise of city mascot Suwahime. They would also begin working on releasing accessories for snap fits under their PLUM label that same year, as well as putting out their own model kits, producing kits of characters from old games like PangYa (a golfing MMO) and ToHeart2 (a reasonably popular romance game) under their Plafia line.
In 2013, they would begin developing their own mecha snap-fit model series with Pla-Act, starting with a Date Masamune-themed mecha, before developing model kits for retro video games like TwinBee and Gradius. In the 20s, they’d also begin producing more modern Plafia kits, starting first with the Tohoku Zunko girls, before expanding to other properties such as Is The Order a Rabbit? and Doala, mascot of the Chunichi Dragons baseball team.
Produced Lines:
Leave a Reply