Identifying Pokémon Center Merchandise using Barcodes

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In the past 18 months I’ve been collecting Pichu merchandise as well as cards, however where Pichu is such a popular Pokémon (in terms of merchandise, at least) I’m intentionally limiting myself to only collecting Pokémon Center products.

Sometimes it’s hard to know which company manufactured and distributed a specific item but fortunately we can make this process very simple by looking at barcodes.

In short, there are 3 main barcode formats to look out for:

  • 452 1329 XXXXX X (Pokémon Center Japan)
  • 493 5228 XXXXX X (Media Factory - not Pokémon-specific)
  • 082 0650 XXXXX X (The Pokémon Company International (TPCi))

* There are a couple of others I’m currently unsure of, see the ‘Others’ section below.

The Pokémon Center Company (1998 to present)
Japan’s Pokémon Center Company has been responsible for the manufacture of Pokémon Center merchandise since it began taking over responsibility from Media Factory in early 1998. This coincided with the opening of the Pokémon Center Tokyo shop on 25th April 1998 and has been going strong ever since.

23 years on, The Pokémon Center Company has been responsible for 33,000 different Pokémon products including stickers, telephone cards, guitars, video game consoles and booster boxes.

Barcodes on The Pokémon Center Company products all begin 452 1329… (or 4 521329 … as it’s displayed on the products themselves). If you see that barcode, you can be sure that it’s a Pokémon Center Company official product.

Media Factory (2000 to ~2003)
Before the name “Pokémon Center” had been thought up, Media Factory was responsible for manufacturing cards, booster packs and booster boxes along with a few other pieces of Pokémon merchandise. When Pokémon Center did launch as a brand name in 1998, Pokémon Center initially took over from the manufacture of merchandise and in 2001 took over from the manufacture of Pokémon cards themselves.

Despite this, there are a small number of Pokémon Center-branded products which were manufactured by Media Factory between 2000 and 2003. These products all have barcodes beginning 493 5228… (or 4935228 … as tends to be displayed on the products themselves).

Do note that Media Factory is responsible for a LOT of different products and is not specifically focussed on Pokémon. There are plenty of non-Pokémon products which share the same barcode range.

The Pokémon Company International (2009 to present)
Prior to 2009 all Pokémon Center products found in English-speaking countries were manufactured in Japan by The Pokémon Center Company. Pokémon USA was responsible for managing and advertising these in North America, Australia and New Zealand and Pokémon UK had the same responsibilities for the UK and Europe, but they did not manufacture any products themselves.

TPCi products have barcodes beginning 082 0650 … (or 0 820650 … as tends to be displayed on the products themselves).

Almost every Pokémon Center item released outside of Japan since 2009 has been manufactured by The Pokémon Company International, but occasionally The Pokémon Center Company does provide these items to TPCi.

Other (barcodes currently unknown to me)
Since 2006 Pokémon Korea has been responsible for manufacturing merchandise in South Korea. I don’t have any products to verify their barcodes yet. On top of that, since around 2017 Pokémon Shanghai has been responsible for manufacturing Pokémon TCG items for sale in Taiwan and Hongkong - I don’t know if they also manufacture any merchandise, however.

No other companies are licensed to produce Pokémon Center-branded merchandise, though that doesn’t mean they’re not a direct product from Pokémon itself. Companies like Funko will be licensees of Pokémon and their products can essentially be regarded as third-party, however companies like Nintendo which manufacture video games and things like amiibos are items which have direct (first-party) involvement from Pokémon.

I’ve been slowly putting together a list of barcodes which relate to early Pokémon Center products which I’m hoping to make public eventually. Product IDs are also sequential and can be used to date the products as well - I’m planning on providing some sort of timeline in future as well to allow everyone to be able to easily look at a product and think oh yeah, that’s from 2013 without the year being explicitly printed on the item.

I hope this is of some use.

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This is just great! I have to go through my merch to see what i got. Depth like this is what i love when showcasing my pokemon stuff to my friends, i can aready see their eyebrows raise when i go through the details and origin of some random sticker sheets :grin:

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Might be an outlier but I have some Pokemon Center products from 1998 with later codes. Here is a hand fan with 4971~ barcode, all the others I have also have the 4971~.

521×640 43.7 KB

From the online store in 1998, you can see the fans on the right:
1376×847 162 KB

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Interesting! It’s worth noting that the first 3 digits of the barcode represent the country. 490-499 is the old Japanese code (for companies which were created pre-1992) and 450-59 is the new code (post-1992). That means that this hand fan you’ve shared was made by a company which was registered prior to 1992 - could be some obscure division of Media Factory, perhaps.

It could also simply be a company like TOMY or Bandai having their products stocked by Pokémon Center itself (though those two would certainly have their own company name visible). It’d be interesting to find other examples of that barcode which include copyright info.

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I have 2 different Korean booster boxes at home I can check tonight if you’d like.

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@pichufan, I think they were licensed by Shopro which is an offshoot of Shogakukan aka CoroCoro comics which might explain the weird serial but most importantly I have not come across a Pichu fan but it would be cool if there was one! That is interesting to think that the Pokemon Centers might have stocked other licensed product, it is a pity that there isn’t an extensive catalogue of product. I would kill for a silver bible type book dedicated to Pokemon Center releases.

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This would be good but ideally a barcode would be better from some misc (non-Nintendo/non-TCG) product bought from Korea’s Pokémon Store: www.pokemonstore.co.kr.

Haha, that would be really awesome. I’m hoping to achieve some level of that with the barcode list I’m working on - though in hindsight I probably should have saved pictures of everything as well.

An example of a modern product stocked at Pokémon Center shops is the video games themselves - those aren’t Pokémon Center products, rather they’re manufactured and primarily distributed by Nintendo, yet Pokémon Center do still stock them. ShoPro was one of the original Pokémon copyright holders so I guess it does make sense that their products would have been stocked in the official Pokémon store.

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A Pichu fan for PichuFan, now that would be something. :grin:

As always great work on the research, James!

Greetz,
Quuador

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@pichufan, always appreciate your work. Having heavy hitters like @shizzlemetimbers and @quuador - you 3 could effectively create an entire catalog of every Pokemon item in the world if you decided to make your own business. :stuck_out_tongue:

I do have a question though - So say you know something was produced from Pokemon Center Japan with the 4521329 code - would the rest of the code potentially be able to tell identifying information of the product and which location it was distributed (say - it went to Pokemon Center Hiroshima vs Pokemon Center Tokyo)? Or would it just identify the product itself and the price?

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No sadly it just identifies the product itself.

The format of a barcode is basically: AAA BBBB CCCCC D, where A is the country code (as briefly described in my previous post), B is the manufacturer code, C is the product ID and D is a checksum (a number which is used to ensure the barcode is valid).

From my list an example barcode I can give is 452 1329 01129 5. This is the barcode for the Pokémon Center New York 2001 plate set I picked up recently:

  • 452 tells us it was manufactured in Japan;
  • 1329 tells us it was manufactured by The Pokémon Center Company*;
  • 01129 tells us it has a product ID of 1,129;
  • 5 is used to validate the barcode.

* To my knowledge there is no company directory for things like this, it’s just something which needs to be actively discovered.

Regardless of whether this was sold online, at Pokémon Center Tokyo, Osaka or New York is something we can’t determine from the barcode alone. Some items may have different address information and some items shipped outside of Japan may have had their packaging translated into English, but in terms of the barcode alone that doesn’t reveal that information.

What we can do though is ascertain a rough date from that. Product IDs are fortunately sequential from when they were registered - this alone isn’t very helpful, but it means we can compare them to other product IDs and cross-reference them with known points in time. This plate set was - along with several other products - part of the Pokémon Center New York grand opening memorabilia, and the grand opening happened in November 2001.

We can then look at another product, like this Pokémon Center Online sticker set I also picked up a few months ago (the one on the left):

This one has a barcode of 452 1329 01012 0 and I know that this sticker pack is from the launch/rebrand of the Pokémon Center Online website in March 2001. This tells us that product IDs 1,012 to 1,129 all fall between roughly March and November 2001, which is fantastic here because those other three sticker packs have product IDs of 1,036, 1,037 and 1,038 and despite not having any obvious tell-tale signs of when they were released means I can assume they were likely from some time in May/June 2001 and almost definitely between March and November 2001.

This isn’t an exact science though. Just because a product was manufactured and assigned an ID doesn’t mean it was necessarily put up for sale at that time. Booster Packs from Japan’s Expedition Base Set have a product ID of 1,117 yet the set didn’t launch until December 2001 - this implies that the booster packs were finalised and ready prior to the grand opening of Pokémon Center New York in November 2001. If I didn’t know the release date of Japan’s Expedition Base Set I’d assume that these packs were for sale around October 2001 instead (likewise those 3 sticker packs above could very well predate the March 2001 sticker set, but this fortunately doesn’t happen often so it’s somewhat unlikely).

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@pichufan, that’s solid information to know - good thing you cross reference them to get the most accurate date information. I guess barcode information is dependent on location and what database you have access to. Back when I worked retail and managed my own store, you could look up the UPC/Barcode data for store exclusive items to see where an item came from, when it was produced, which store it went to, and date. Most of the other information on generic goods went more like Country of Origin - Company of Origin - Product Identifier. Most items could at least tell you the general retail value but I assume this is only accessible from in-store databases. I wasn’t sure if Japan measured in a similar vein so thank you.

Considering your idea about cataloging more of this information, would it be beneficial to you at all if me or other members took back/front images of items with barcode info and whatever data we knew of? I know you have your hands full with a couple of different projects, but the idea of cataloging everything into a “Silver Bible” like Shizzle said sounds like every Pokecollector’s wet dream.

Maybe call it the Platinum or Crystal Bible. :stuck_out_tongue:

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Just as a data blip for the cards, international tcg decks also fall into this style of barcoding starting with Ruby/Sapphire with international barcode “8 20650 11000 9”. This is different than the US barcode “0 45496 84004 4”. The differences in international packaging and US packaging seems to have gone away between ex Delta Species decks being released and ex Legend Maker where the single barcode style of “8 20650 10xxx x” and after Triumphant “0 820650 10xxxx” were used for all decks moving forward until Breakthrough when it switched to “0 820650 80xxxx”

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That’d be great, but I’m not sure I’m quite ready for that yet. I’ll tidy up what I have and share it when it’s a bit more presentable.

I’m sure somewhere there’s a Pokémon database out there which does have a full list of all barcodes + their product descriptions, but for now I’m not aware of such a thing being at all public.

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I’m glad you chimed in, @lyleberr - you were one of the people I had in mind too to potentially compile your deck stuff together since it’s one of the major ways the TCG side could be tracked as well.

@pichufan, depending on time and my plans for the summer, I might jump start that as a separate thread - let me know if you would prefer to do that as you are a LOT more organizational than my current capabilities. Considering what you have, Shizzle’s documentation of old era Pokemon items, Quuador’s non-TCG documentation thread, Lyleberr’s decks, and a couple of other things (do posters have UPC codes?) including some international items documented by Single Pokemon collectors, we might at the very least put together a Japanese list if not an international reference guide for Pokemon.

Now if only we had access to that database!

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@azulryu go for it. Here is what I have so far (I’ve started from 00001 which is why I haven’t got far). It may not seem like much but a lot of the items in between return no results, so this is the current state of me performing just over 3,700 Google searches:

docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15-s1Es4-BZm0NsJYcdESaly2SEgQoOeKgooaghYYnt0/edit?usp=sharing

Red items are assumed - though there aren’t many of those. If you need me to clarify anything just shout, for now it’s read only as I don’t want anyone breaking it lol

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Do you know if modern products from TPC still use JAN-13 or 8 bar codes or if they use GTIN? Not that it’s that important, I’m just curious

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They still use the old format. The new Eevee Heroes set is 452 1329 32240 7. The barcodes are actually used as URLs to the products on the Pokémon Center Japan website: www.pokemoncenter-online.com/?p_cd=4521329322407.

That data actually goes back quite far, but not all the way back. This is product ID 20000 for instance: www.pokemoncenter-online.com/?p_cd=4521329200002. Maybe at some point I’ll make a scraper to fetch all the barcodes it currently has hosted.

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This is amazing. A man can lose himself easily on mercari and Y!J searching for codes and picture references. I already see a few spots I can fill. I’ll make a copy myself and see if I can casually start on it and go from there before I make a thread of it. If I get some solid leeway, I’ll start the project and tag you amongst a few others.

Thanks, man!

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Ok so my small head cant fathom the amount of info just yet here, but looks pretty damn insane in depth and very cool being im collecting a lot of old toys and plushies and such these days. When I get out of work id like to match some barcodes of somethings to see what they might show, but overall awesome work and attention to detail here for sure.

That kind of patience required for this id kill to have haha.

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Ha, for me it all started when I realised I kept going around in circles thinking “hey, I’ve never seen that product” only to then do some research and realise I was looking at the same thing 6 months prior. The intent I had in keeping track of barcodes was that it’d give me a list of everything I’ve seen.

I have a lot of products myself which I have yet to note down their barcodes - I’ll do that soon if I get a chance.

In the mean time… I wrote a small script to scrape Japan’s Pokémon Center website and now have the names, release dates and images of 638 valid product IDs between 20,001 and 21,000:

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I might try leaving this running over night and see what happens. I’m running it with a 6 second delay between calls so I shouldn’t be putting too much strain on their server.

If I can work out what the earliest product is on their website this could give us a lot of information. 20,000 to 33,000 should hopefully fill in at least 10,000 of the missing entries.

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