I'm so excited and relieved to announce that the Mandarinfish and Oarfish pins arrived and I had enough higher grade pins to fulfill the last 50 orders yesterday!
Here's a look at the Oarfish:
And the Mandarinfish:
I'm so relieved that enough of these turned out reasonable enough for me to fulfill all your orders! Getting these two specific pins produced has been the most stressful pin production of my life!
Anyway, all the orders are on their way out to you all now!
(Unless you are one of the six people I'm still waiting on surveys or shipping payments from, so if you haven't received a tracking notification please check on your pledge!)
Thank you all for your patience in waiting for these pins to be finished. I really appreciate all of your support.
A quick progress update on production and fulfillment today:
1) I have now shipped the x90 remaining orders that don't contain Crab, Mandarinfish or Oarfish pins. Those orders should all have had tracking notifications now.
2) The Crab pins arrived today and after grading and backing I'll be shipping the x45 orders I can fulfill with those next week.
3) After a lot of back-and-forth with my manu (who claimed they can fix the misalignment in mass-production more easily than more samples...I am sceptical) I wound up agreeing to let them try the final production for the Mandarinfish and Oarfish pins on the understanding that if I'm not happy with the end result they would agree to remake them if needed.
This is not ideal but I feel I've kept everyone waiting far too long for these two pins and I'm honestly at the end of my rope with the process and don't want to drag it out waiting several more weeks for additional samples.
I received photos of the finished Oarfish today! I'm still not very happy with the alignment on the screenprint layers but at this point I've decided to cut my losses as I don't think the factory is capable of better printing any longer. Here are the photos the manu sent me:
To be fair the screenprint details on this design are so small that the misalignmnet is only obvious when you look very closely. 🤔
4) My plan for handling the remaining orders waiting on the Mandarinfish and Oarfish pins at this point is:
Wait for final photos of the Mandarinfish from my manufacturer later this week.
Share the photos with you.
Allow the remaining 45-ish of you that are waiting for those designs to arrive to choose between accepting those pins as they are, or swapping out that part of your order for other pins.
5) In fact if you are fed up of waiting and would prefer to make a pin-swap for your order now, please drop me an email and I will make the swap and ship out your order asap.
Swap out options include: other Warped Ocean pins, the Sunfish and Turtle pins from my Warped Ocean 2 campaign (which are arrived today along with the Crab pins), Furbtaurs, Corvids of Pride, Bestiary, Neurodivergent and Horses of Apocalypse collections.
I apologise again for the delay in fulfillment on this campaign and thank you all for patiently waiting for the manufacturing issues to be sorted out.
Another little update on the frustratingly long road to fulfillment today! First up, here are some photos from my manufacturer of the finished Lobster pins:
I'm really happy with how the details have turned out on this one and I'm looking forward to taking better photos to share when they arrive!
Now the frustrating bit: after waiting 3 weeks I finally got a second set of sample photos for the screenprinting on the Mandarinfish and the Oarfish and they're pretty dissappointing; the print is still misaligned. They also did some uv print samples (which I didn't as for) but although the alignment is somewhat better I really don't like the raised look and texture of the ink.
I've spoken with my rep again who has finally told me that since they're company has gotten bigger they now use several different factories to produce their pins and that the production team assigned my order to a factory that is not very experienced with screenprint.
This is obviously extremely frustrating but I have received assurances that production of these two pins will now be moved to a factory with more screenprinting expertise and that I will have more sample photos in 1 week. I'm hoping third time is the charm! 🤞😬
I'll update you on progress again once I have the third set of sample photos next week.
In the meantime all the other pins have been finished so I've asked my manufacturer to ship those to me now, with the aim to start fulfilling the orders without those two pins as soon as possible. I'm waiting on a shipping estimate for those but I'm hoping to have them within a couple of weeks. 🤞
I want to apologise again for the delay in fulfillment for these pins.
I have been very frustrated that my first manufacturer took 6 weeks to tell me they couldn't make the pins, and the slow progress with the screenprinting has been extending the timeline far more than I expected.
This is my first time working with screenprint and I was unaware that manufacturers could take weeks for each sample round. In future I will know to factor in much more time for sampling when including screenprint in my designs.
Thank you all for your patience in this!
I'll be throwing random free stickers into everyone's orders once I can start shipping.
Today I have a little preview of the Octopus pins for you from my manufacturer:
I'm excited to see how these look in person! I should get new sample photos for the Oarfish and Mandarinfish soon too.
I've also made an embroidered patch version of the Octopus design for my Warped Ocean 1.2 campaign and thought you might like to see the sample photo for that too! Here it is:
(If any of you would like to add one of these to your order, drop me a message.)
I've had some in-progress and finished pin photos from my manufacturer! XD
Here are the finished tiny Eye filler pins:
...and the finished Starfish and Brain Coral pins: I think the increase to 1.5" for these was the right decision as the details have come out really nice and crisp! :D
Here are some finished Nudibranch pins too:
The three pins with screenprint details (Mandarinfish, Oarfish and Crab) are currently in proofing stage. The first set of proofs for the Mandarinfish and Oarfish had some issues with detail bleeding due to them not using a fine enough mesh screen for the level of details so they're currently making new samples with an improved screenprint for those and I won't share the first attempts (lol they are a little sloppy but I know my manu can do better. I'll share progress pics once they get it right!)
The Crab screenprint is looking good, but I think I'm going to re-sample the red one with a darker screenprint colour as the contrast is a little low on the darker red enamel:
The Blue/Green rainbow-plated Crab is looking good though! Check out the happy-accident green tone on the rainbow-plating for the claws on the sample:
The other large pins are all in various stages of production so I'll share a couple of the other progress pics my manu sent me. Here are some almost-finished rainbow-plated Octopuses:
And some partially-filled Lobster pins:
I'm excited to see how the rest of these turn out and I hope you are too! :D
I'll update again when I have a better idea of when I'll be receiving the pins!
