Hey all - it’s Mel and Venetia tapping in today with an update.

Thanks so much for your patience with us over the production period; Mel and Venetia are mostly still dealing with the main bulk of production, and we’ve been working hard behind the scenes. We’re a week behind schedule with this update so you have our apologies - Mel’s had a death in the family this week and Venetia’s dealing with her 6-month-old daughter while trying to run her business, so even writing this update was a ping pong game between us. Thank you very much for sticking with us – you get cookies if you get to the bottom of this update.

All said, long story short, we have some good news and some bad news.

Some of the good news first – Jess’s Basil, Moss and Nightshade pins are finished and the quality checks look good according to Jess’s feedback. The same goes for many of the filler pins – these have arrived from Mel’s first manufacturer and are being quality checked by Mel. The only one in Jess’s batch of fillers that we’ve seen significant errors with is the Map of Meowing, which Mel’s already worked out remakes with the manufacturer and these are nearing completion.

Mel’s pins of the DERP guild are all in production or finished and in the process of being checked. We have mentioned this before but some of the sampling processes can take a while because of the difficulties with Pantone colors, how well some manufacturers can match them, and then playing the trial-and-error game of picking new Pantones until they look right and as identical as possible to the artwork in the campaign. We also faced the previously mentioned issues where the representative was sick in the hospital for a while and straight up forgot about some pins. We have four pins being finalized for samples now from that set, but the rest are all complete/being completed in mass production.

Generally speaking, we haven't seen any excessive error rates aside from the Map of Meowing already mentioned from the manufacturer, and the secondary manufacturer working on the remaining pins (while slower) has a decently acceptable error rate as well. While not perfect, we don't anticipate needing remakes for this pin to finish getting standards for later fulfillment.

Here are some samples of pins you haven’t seen yet from this set:

In addition, the Guardian sword pictured in the last update is now a reality - this just exited mass production (from a fifth manufacturer that took this on).

Mel’s also working on bagging the sticker packs, and finishing up production on the microfiber cloths in the campaign (these should be shipped before the end of this month). Since these had a 1,000 MOQ, we had to wait until we were ready with a multi-design order before we could get those into production, but we had enough recently to begin them, and they should be here before month’s end.

Unfortunately the most complicated of problems comes with Venetia’s pins (centered around the pins in the Destruction guild).

As mentioned previously, we had some weird problems when Venetia’s rep who she trusted and had worked with on previous pin campaigns, where they either quit or got fired. (The rep claims she quit, the company who she worked with claims she was fired after they’d ghosted us for a time and finally came clean that they weren’t the same rep anymore.) The pins were already paid for and begun with production at this point, so we had to continue with the process. However, as time has gone on with the new rep, we have run into a barrage of issues with both this campaign along with any residual orders Venetia had with this company.

First the colors on some samples were often way off the ones we provided in the artwork, so that took a lot of juggling to sort out. Artwork was also changed without warning and sometimes without good reason with design elements. Then when production began the rep claimed through her “quality checks” that many pins were not up to standard and had to be remade (Dragon Cat went through this process three times).

Then, finally, a portion of the first batch of pins were finished and arrived with Mel. Heartbreakingly, 90% of the pins have quality issues which aren’t passable. Many aren’t passable even for seconds grade, let alone standards.

All of the above errors were very common. You can probably see some of the errors above - the dragons all had large underfills in the full body or just the tail (the pastel, specifically, had almost 55% that were far below even secondary grade lines, and the rest were secondaries with only 3 as standard). We also saw extreme textures that couldn't be removed (as seen on Pesto), scratching from poor polishing, more minor underfills, and many many many bubbles that were prevalent in all pins from this manufacturer. This wasn't an issue in any other manufacturers.

Out of the designs which have arrived so far (Pesto, Prince, King Lich, Simon, Imp, Biscuits, and both colors of Cute Dragon Cat), Prince and King Lich have the highest pass rate of 40%. This means if the company ships the remaining spare pins we ordered, we should have just enough for those of you who have ordered them. The rest have between a 4 and 5% standard pass rate, which is abysmal, and means for some pins we only have about 3 which are standard grade even if we graded everything without exception. 

We have been having a large back and forth both between ourselves and then with the company trying to figure out the best step to take next. This has included grading all of the pins that have arrived with Mel and documenting all of the flaws one at a time. This is already a large task to do one time (without documenting pins), but adding the correspondence and documenting has made the situation worse.

Since there were so many different issues to varying degrees of -bawling-our-eyes-out-terrible- on most of the designs, we had concerns about asking the company to remake them once again only to have more quality control issues, especially given that some had already been remade many times before being sent to us due to not passing the rep’s quality control. (With, of course, the added element that the pins shipped to us were then ‘good enough to pass’ their quality control, thus we dread to think what the original flaws were like). It was also clear from our exchanges that we weren’t considering the same things as flaws (as they called huge underfills as “overpolishing” and excused large amounts of bubbles in enamel as “unavoidable” - both entirely false things).

Unfortunately many of the remaining pins in this guild are with this company (other than Abigail and Catalina, which were with Mel’s company due to their pearl effects and precise screen printing). So our plan is proposed to them as follows:

The above proposal was put to the representative of Venetia’s company two weeks ago, but the rep has since replied saying she is on leave as her daughter is ill in hospital. She said when she is back she will “apply for the best solution with her boss and reply to us”... So at the moment we are waiting while anxiously biting our nails off.

Since all of the money from this campaign has gone into producing the products for this campaign, we are in a very tight situation with getting these pins sorted. However, due to the delays already caused by the size of the campaign design wise, we are very conscious of anything extending those delays. We decided to use some of our own funds to get a smaller number of the designs with issues made at another, more trusted company which Mel had contact with and had already completed their share of pins (not the one still ongoing production). These are now being sorted and we’ve already restarted this process.

We completely understand any frustration people have had so far with the delays, but please know we are working on this as much as we can (as well as dumping many extra thousands in to make sure quality is maintained), and these issues have been difficult to navigate & make known until we had talked things through with the manufacturer and had some sort of a concrete plan moving forward. 

We do want to assure you that, for all pins that are good, we are making sure applicable standard/good grade pins are set aside and held in reserve for backers first and won’t be touched for any reason. We wanted to be clear that no standards will be sold until we have everything fulfilled (though we've begun tossing the excessive number of trash pins we have into the trash bins at cons); we're still deciding on whether we have the space to bring a small board of these designs to NYCC, but it will only be in seconds grades at their adjusted retail costs. This is partially necessary to just recoup some costs, as with the error/remakes, we likely won't see any returned funds for a minute with the rep being unreachable.

All said again, thank you for bearing with us until the end of the update, and we understand it was a bit of a lengthy thing to offer transparency to the situation. By the next update, Mel is hoping to have enough pins graded from the original shipments to know if anything else will have issues with errors (and resolve that if it's necessary) as well as setting aside all fulfilment-reserved standards, and is hoping to have all the remakes sampled and in mass manufacturing by then (with the remaining either finishing or finished with mass manufacturing).

- Mel & Venetia (& the rest of the Purrtagonists crew)