Warped Ocean

Hi everyone!

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.

All the best,

Abi

Hi folks,

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:
 

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.

All the best,

Abi

Hi everyone,

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.

All the best,

Abi