I have news today! First up some clearer photos of the finished silver plated versions of the pins.
Don't they look so good! And you can see the glitter and pearl clearly now. (I actually switched manufacturers for this project and they offered me the option of just pearl or swirl pearl. My old manu stopped doing swirl pearl and it is my preferred pearl look, so was delighted when they said they did it!) You may noticed the outline metal is a little thicker than on the original illustrations, this is just the nature of the making digital designs into smaller tangible objects sometimes. I'm very happy with them overall though.
Now the silver plated ones have been checked and will be sent me to hopefully in the next couple of days.
Which leads me onto the gold plated pins and their problems :(
(Anyone who has been around for pins I've made before will remember the chaos of the Windows of Wonder gold plated pins, apparently I am cursed with gold plated pins regardless of who I use haha.) My manu alerted me to an issue where the pins have severely oxidised between receiving them and checking them. (They send them to a different place to be plated.) They are not happy about it and it has become a big issue with lots of people's orders effected. They are going to try to get them re-plated properly (they suspect the place they send them has been cutting corners due to the cost of gold going up) but this could damage the pins if the plating factory mess up, so there is a chance the pins will need re-doing from scratch. This may cause a bit of a delay. Even with this delay I hope that we will still be able to ship in August as planned.
Not the update I wanted to give you all today but such is the nature of manufacturing at the moment.
Back with a little update today. I have photos from my pin manufacturer of some of the pins after electroplating which means we are getting close to completion!
It is very hard to see (and I did have to ask to confirm haha) but if you zoom really far in you can see hints of the glitter in the white and hints of the pearl in the black! I was hoping for some more close up photos but not had any yet.
I have since had an update that some issues were found during the quality checking and are being sent back to hopefully be fixed but this will delay them shipping to me. We are still well within the deadline for shipping the items to you all, so it shouldn't cause too many issues. Hopefully I'll still have the pins in the next few weeks :)(assuming there isn't too many of them to be fixed ofc!)
As always I will keep you all updated as we move along!
Good morning everyone! I hope you are all doing well <3
Just a quick update that the pins are slowly making their way through production, initial colours are going in and a little extra time will be needed for adding the glitter and pearl but I added in plenty of buffer time, so we should still be on schedule :)
Here are some photos from my manufacturer. Not the most exciting but its something haha. It will probably be a couple weeks before I have much in the way of updates after this.
Thank you for filling in your surveys (there is 1 backer who has not yet done so, please do so soon if you want any add-ons!!!) I will be locking the order potion (so your pledge and add-ons) now so no changes can be made there but you CAN still edit your address at any point!
Also a little sticker update, I got a sample from a different place and I will probably get that second batch of stickers made with the other manufacturer and will decide how I feel about everything after they have arrived too (I will be making a few changes for these ones, the original are exactly what was advertised on backerkit, these are just because I am being indecisive haha.)
The next update might not be for a little bit, probably once I have sticker and/or enamel pin updates which may not be for a couple of weeks :)
Just popping in to let you know that I have confirmed everything with my manufacturer for the pins and they will head into production as soon as they are able. Yay! If all is well I am hoping to have them all sometime very late May/early June, though I have built in extra time to should they arrive later than that or to account for manufacturing issues etc etc, so we *SHOULD* meet the August shipping estimate deadline all being well :)
I had the first batch of stickers arrive and I don't love how they turned out (plus a printing error didn't help haha) so I have a test print coming from a different manufacturer (Who I have used for plain stickers before, they didn't have holo at the time) so if I like those, I will get everything redone using that manufacture instead (with minor tweaks to the artwork, to add a little bit of depth hopefully!) I will keep you all updated!
There are 7 of you who have not filled in your survey, please do so soon to make sure you can get any extras you want as these prices are backerkit exclusive. (And you won't have to pay for any of those extras till I am ready to charge shipping in the Summer, so you can basically split the payment hehe. I will do an update before this happens ofc.)
Any questions or issues, you can reply to this update or email direct [email protected]
