I’ve been made aware that some people have flagged an issue with the ISAT merch from certain vendors where characters are showing up with lighter coloring than they have in the game.
First, I want to thank everyone for their patience while I spoke with the vendors (in this case, The Yetee) directly. I wanted to have all the information before I made a more direct statement, and I think it’s important to make this clear; I hear you, I appreciate this being raised, and I will be working with the Yetee to ensure the next round of restocks for all affected items don’t have this issue again, as well as any vendors I work with going forward.
Also, I want to make it clear that as a POC myself, I would not tolerate white washing of my characters! I have been very vocal and direct working with everyone around ISAT from merch to marketing and beyond in ensuring the cast is depicted properly. These are not white characters, and even in the impacted merch, that is abundantly clear. Further, as you can see, it’s something that is consistent across other aspects of the same impacted characters’ design, such as Mirabelle’s cloak. This isn’t isolated to skin tones.
To give a bit more detail on why the pieces of merch look lighter, it is due to the printing process. When producing printed goods, whether that's on paper, acrylics, or vinyl, the colors you see on screen are not always exactly the same as what gets printed out— if you've ever fiddled with RGB vs CMYK colors in an art program like Photoshop, you already have an idea of how finicky this can sometimes be, even with grayscale tones. This is why Pantones and set color guides are important when producing merchandise. Moving forward, The Yetee and I intend on reevaluating our ISAT color guides to ensure that characters' appearances are appearing physically closer to what you can see in-game.
I appreciate that people care so much about these characters and how they’re depicted. I want to stress that I would never move forward with anything (merch, marketing asset, whatever) that I felt was deliberately misrepresenting anything I made, or the characters in them.
Lastly, we appreciate The Yetee being so receptive and immediately proactive in wanting to fix this as soon as we reached out, and going forward we'll be more mindful with any additional merch partners to help ensure color accuracy/matching to official artwork. Thank you as always for your patience and understanding!!!
