Hey everyone! Apologies for the delay with updates - right now, it's just Mel and Venetia working on this campaign, and we've both doing our best considering what's been happening. We'd both been heavily prepping for NYCC in October (with Mel attending two other events immediately afterwards), but our major hangup has still been with the extreme difficulties surrounding Venetia’s manufacturer, including being ghosted for large chunks of time while seeing some of the worst error rates either of us have ever seen.

If looking for seconds shop info, that's at the end in the backer section! Cookies if you read the rest of this though. We know it's long.

We’re echoing notes from the last update: we have a mix of bad and good news. A minor positive before going into the ouch news: at this point we have all pins that aren’t impacted by the news below in our possession. These pictured are the last ones to be showcased (everything else has been shown, unless Mel is really bad at documenting, which is possible, but there are... 55 pin designs).

In addition, attached to this update is a small poll as Mel's doing some designs for the backing cards. Would you rather have one fun "adventuring" style noting some of the stops/adventures in the campaign, or individual cards based on the three guilds? No wrong answer here! Generally large cards have less waste, but small cards are more easily reusable.

Onto the bad news. The bad news is that, unfortunately, we are still somehow waiting for the finals of Venetia’s pins to be finished with the original manufacturer. We've sent multiple emails about this to them - asking for refunds, asking for proof, asking for them to get moved along - you name it, we've tried it. They've just been extremely resistant to any compromises that admit fault on their end (which hadn't been an issue prior to the representative being replaced), and the quality (as we mentioned in the last update) went into the garbage can. This was… unexpected on Venetia’s end, as it was a manufacturer she’d had for years, so we hadn’t anticipated having any major issues with them.

The last update we got from Venetia’s manufacturer before NYCC was that Spud was the final pin waiting to be colored, but that’s the last we heard until we pushed again for another update which we finally got last week. The Chinese national holiday Golden Week did delay some responses, but that doesn’t excuse the company for taking well over a month to say anything specific. 

Unfortunately, after probing and pushing for the update, we found out that Spud did not pass their quality checks and was being remade - again. Not only that, but two other pins have also been sent back after not passing their "quality checks" and haven’t finished being remade yet. Some of these pins have been in production and remade for the better part of a year, and they haven’t even been sent to us yet in any capacity. They will not send out any other pins until they are all finished (including other unrelated pins Venetia has been waiting for for 5 months - which have apparently been remade six times).

Of course, also, we’d already seen some of their “remade” and “quality checked” pins - they’d told us that huge underfills that encompassed the entire pin (shown in the last update) weren’t issues because you couldn’t see it from the side, told us these flaws were “polishing issues” (as if we didn’t know what an underfill looked like), and spent multiple emails telling us that extreme bubbling (like 5+ bubbles per pin, on average) were “normal” and scratches that were sometimes an inch long were “unavoidable”. We’ve reached the end of our sanity with this company, and are doing our best to come to any compromise that’ll take.