#sproutydoll

[charlietheskonk]

AAAAAHHH!!!  ✨✨✨ all i want to do is take pictures of him

[micaeverywhere]

Sproutydoll Risa painted by me

[onionbulb]

Mary's new Sproutydoll eyes and mohair wig I made between faceups! ❤

[emilysbjds]

Kaia with her new eyes! 

Eyes are from Sprouty Doll. 

[brittmiscast]

My Mom-Mom is in the hospital with cancer... She loves my dolls so much, so I brought Miyuki with me to cheer her up. She taught me to crochet when I was young, so I'm sitting by her bed as she sleeps making Miyuki a hat to show her later. 💗 #bjd #doll #sproutydoll #sproutydolleyes #volks #volksdoll #sdmf33 #sdmidi #msd #crochet #miniaturecrochet

[bjdscamwatch-blog]

Sproutydoll - plagiarism or rip off?

I’ve had a few followers DM me on whether Sproutydoll, the eye maker was plagiarising and also asked me for receipts. 

Here’s screenshots from their instagram claiming that they were being unfairly attacked on instagram by cubeco000, where you can purchase the molds here :https://item.taobao.com/item.htm?spm=a1z0d.6639537.1997196601.4.Y8GwAx&id=531226348516, You can read the text here.

She’s mostly saying that she isn’t plagiarizing and merely re-selling them. This is cubeco000′s instagram which did the callout.

However, the question is if she did credit or indicate that the molds were made by herself, or just purchased and she was a reseller. It is very suspect that she is selling the molds at $40, a great markup from the $4 that cubeco000 is selling at. 

If customers knew that she was reselling molds, the possibility of them buying such molds and eye-make kits from her would be low as they could go to the source directly. So, after looking through her website I believe she misrepresented herself as having made those molds herself.

Here are screenshots of her website.

She says “molded from 3D printed parts”, leading the customer to believe that she molded them herself.

Her resin kit without the mold consists of these.

Screenshots from her instagram:

She says “Regular molds take around 6 weeks to complete and to ship”, directly misleading customers to think that she is making the molds. Otherwise she should have said that they took 6 weeks to ship to her from her taobao agent.

“I know it is high but it’s all expensive stuff for me to produce and package” - what is she producing exactly, other than maybe repackaging the resin into smaller bottles or making the molds? I can hardly imagine her producing plastic cups or boxes or wooden stirrers. She is DIRECTLY leading customers into thinking she produced the molds. 

Finally, on andreja’s instagram

“She was the one who made the awesome mold that you see me using for my custom eyes. She worked super hard on these so show her some love”

Andreja is also directly stating that Sproutydoll made for her eye molds, and so the implication is that her kits also have the molds made by Sprouty. Otherwise, who would buy from Sproutydoll when the whole kit, in its various parts, could all be acquired for less than $10, and they were instead paying $90 for it? 

Most of the equipment is available very easily too. Stirrers, non stick mat and plastic cups, who wouldn’t have that?

Lastly, here is Sproutydoll’s justification for the high markup on the molds.

“Again, reselling isn't stealing. I never said I made the molds. I have been dming with Cubeco, and after a few messages they have not responded again. I told them I bought the molds and I can prove it, and where I got them from. They seem to be reading something I wrote months ago and thinking it is about these molds. Again they are saying I am stealing for reselling. As for the price, when you are importing something as a business to sell, you must pay import taxes and fees. Imagine I buy $100 in molds. Immediately add 25% to the price for the agent. Add $45 for shipping to the agent and then to me. Add around 40% import taxes and fees for importing, depending on what it is classified under in customs. Then there is the failure rate, around 15%, molds that have resin stick after they are tested. Then there is the normal retail costs like packaging, issues with orders/refunds, the time it takes to find and prepare the item, listing fees, storage fees etc. Usually for retail, you need the total cost to get the product to you and your customers to be 50% of what an item sells for in order to make a profit that makes the item worth the effort. It's not as simple as "This product cost four dollars on Taobao, you're a con artist for charging so much more". It literally not worth the effort of importing it to sell it for less than 30. It's the same for places like tatas paradise, who sell items for a very high markup on the overseas websites and on their Taobao it is a third of the price. Tata even states they do not sell to agents or resellers, a common practice on Taobao for sellers who don't want their items to be sold by resellers. Reselling isn't stealing, and I never said I made the molds. It's not discrimination or like recasting, it's the standard model for retail businesses. If Cubeco didn't want their molds bought legitimately and resold, they should have stated so on their Taobao store. You don't have to get permission to resell. If you buy something, you have the right to do what you want with it. It would be different if I said that I had created them, that they were mine. It also doesn't make sense for me to have to credit them on the listing page.” (bolded mine) It definitely is disappointing to see her slander cubeco000 and say that there’s such a high failure rate for her products too. Just all around bad business, misrepresenting and ripping off. 

Conclusion: Not a scammer, but a liar,

[sproutybjd-blog]

Silicone Molds

Firstly, let me start by saying that I have an apology post in the works for Cubeco, the maker of the silicone molds I purchased last month. In a previous post, I responded to an anonymous confession about the price of my silicone molds. I had originally gotten them off of Taobao for around $10 USD for the cost of the base mold. After importing, they cost me around $55 in taxes, fees, packaging, etc. each. I had to price them around $75 to make up for that, and people weren’t happy with that price. The anonymous confession said that there were better, cheaper molds on Taobao for less than five dollars, and a reblog had a link to Cubeco molds. So I decided to purchase some Cubeco molds in order to lower the price of the molds for sale in my store, since it was a common complaint that they were too expensive. The cost of molds: Imagine I buy $100 in molds. The shipping cost will be $45, the cost to my Agent will be $35, since I am a business. I also have to file to have them imported, since they have to go through customs and must be declared. Then I have to pay the taxes, which I could never figure out if they were for the price I paid or the price I was selling for, so I always just did the price I was selling for. $35 in import duties and taxes, since I am a business. The cost of packaging $20 for that many molds, and a 15% failure rate (resin sticking to the molds during testing before they are sent out to people) and the price is significantly higher. In order to make a profit, business sources suggest that you buy an item for 1/4th to 1/2 the cost you plan to sell it for, everything included as far as packaging and fees. The cost to import a single mold that might have cost only $5 on Taobao could end up costing me around $30 to import it legally into the United States and after all Shopify/Etsy listing fees and State and Federal taxes, packaging, failure and return rates, etc. So in order to make any profit at all, I have to sell the mold for almost double that... Which I can’t, because no one will buy them for that price. So after all of the importing, etc, the profit margin is quite low. It is still slightly more profitable than making them myself, since I’m not an expert mold maker.

Now that the cost of the molds (which people say is too high and think I am trying to rip them off/con people into overpaying for the molds) is out of the way, let’s get started with the rest.

On March 6th, 2017 I purchased a large order from this Taobao shop: [Link] [Item] And I purchased around $200 in molds of various sizes. Here is a photo of some of the items I received. The items arrived April 12th, 2017. So far I have not many of them, mostly just the “Single Mold” that I purchased from another seller on Taobao, who allows reselling. The only molds I have sold from Cubeco have been the 12mm molds, because the previous single mold that I had did not include a 12mm. As of April 23rd, 2017, I have sold 5 Cubeco molds.

[Link] Around April 21st, I received a notification on Instagram that I was tagged by @cubeco000 there [Link], on a picture that says “I made this mold @sproutydoll” and I liked the image. At the time, I thought that this person was the original maker of the mold and was showing that they had made the mold. It wasn’t until April 22nd that I began receiving notifications that cubeco000 was tagging people and commenting that I had plagiarized them.  I sent cubeco000 a message to see what was going on, and realized that they had sent me a message earlier in the day and I had not seen it, since it was marked as spam on Instagram. We spoke back and forth, but since cubeco000 doesn’t speak much English and I don’t speak any Chinese, I think there was a misunderstanding. I offered to credit them and remove the listings from my website and direct people to their Taobao if they wished to buy. Cubeco000 doesn’t have an English listing or a way for non-Chinese to buy the molds,  but they said that they did not want me to sell the molds, so I was fine with sending people to Taobao instead. Cubeco000 did not respond to any of these messages besides accusing me of copying them, plagiarizing them, and stealing from them. They read the messages (IG marks read messages with a little symbol) and then went to make more comments on my Instagram images about how I was a cheater, a liar, a copycat, and plagiarizing them, and tagging my customers and other BJD people along the way.

In the PMs, cubeco000 doesn’t say much, but I think there is a misunderstanding. I am working with a friend to have cubeco000 write out what they would like, and what they feel is the issue in Chinese and have it translated so I can respond to it. For now, I will do a breakdown of the issues that were brought up in our DM. [Link to full conversation]

- I had not read the initial message from Cubeco000, since it was filtered as spam. When I sent them the first message on my end, it showed their message immediately after. I ask for proof, since the IG account is very new and had not posted many photographs or anything like that. Later on, cubeco000 provided sufficient proof [Link] with a mold master photograph, which I assume is made with a CNC lathe, something I had considered doing as well and find really fascinating (In the USA, the CNC shops near me all charge 500 an hour to design and use the machines, so it’s not something I can do yet!). - Cubeco000 also provided a photo of their Weibo, though I have no idea how to use Weibo. Apparently it is a Chinese blogging site. - “I am very sad about Nicolle, you made her think you did it” I am sure they are talking about Andreja from Nicolle’s Dreams [Link], and the mold I made her in June, 2016. [Link] which was a mold I had made from my own eyes, and is very different from Cubeco’s molds.  I have always made my own eyes for selling to customers, with the exception of the 3d printing company I had tested out from China. I ended up not very happy with the eyes, since they weren’t made to the specifications that I had sent them, and ended up getting rid of them. Here are some of the first ones I made, round and flat and hard to use. [Link] and the mold for them was a two-part [Link] and the eyes I used for most of the other time[Link] and [Link] for the mold, before I tried to use the 3d molds from the beginning of this year. You can see how I usually make the eye bases by a lathe style attachment to my dremel, then using a tool to carve them perfectly round, then drill out the centers and fill it with clear resin until it’s the right height to make the eyes. Here is a link to the 3D printed ones that were too oddly sized [Link] and discontinued shortly after I got them. Here is a link to some new eyes, made the same way with the lathe as the originals, but these are as small as 4mm. [Link] -Cubeco000 sends an image of an article I did for Musume, [Link] that was done before October, 2016, six months before I had ever gotten molds from them. They highlighted where I had said I make my own molds (which, for production of eyes, I still do). I show them the photo of my own handmade molds, which are ugly and tend to be hard to work with and customers don’t really want that when they are buying molds. I went to fetch the link to my listing, which I had set up to say they were manufactured by an outside source before, but when I changed suppliers I didn’t add it to the new listing. -Cubeco000 asks about my 3d design, which again, I ended up not using because they were ugly. I proved that I produce my own bases with the tiny 4mm, 6mm and 8mm ones I had made last month. -Cubeco000 no longer responds to my PMs, but they are still submitting comments on my photos that say that I am a thief, a copycat, stealing from them, etc. Some others join in to complain about the price. It is upsetting to me that I am trying to resolve this and they would rather make a scene. I really don’t know what they want at this point. To be clear, their listing never said that they didn’t want resellers or foreign agents to buy. Shops like Tata’s Paradise on Taobao and Sunny’s World on Taobao are very clear that they don’t want resellers and won’t sell to agents, and they cancel orders that are large in order to prevent agents from buying to resell. If they would have said this in their listing, I would not have bothered to buy from them and kept my original supplier, who was more expensive but fine with resellers and agents. I have also never claimed to make these molds. The listing image is clear that it is made by Cubeco [Link] (I have removed the listing since cubeco000 requested that, so this is just a link to the image) and I have never tried to hide the fact that it was made by someone else and bought through Taobao and an agent. Here is a tumblr post about it [Link] and another [Link], the last one goes into detail about the cost of molds as well. I probably should have provided links, but in the past when I have been more open about my production and supply side of things, people have messaged me telling me not to list them, since it makes it easier for people to copy me or cut out the middleman, so I have been trying to be more business-oriented and not share all the details of things. Even when I made clothes before, I would openly share my patterns and got warned that it would be a good way to lose most of my sales or have shops copy me.

I honestly don’t know what they want from me at this point. The money I have spent on the molds is gone, and Taobao doesn’t offer refunds, and my agent doesn’t either. So far, every time I try to get molds for customers to buy, it becomes a nightmare for me. Any time I try to outsource the production of anything, it becomes a bigger hassle than making it myself. At this point, I am just going to issue an apology and offer a refund to anyone who wants them and will send back the cubeco molds. I’m just flat out of the money I spent on the molds, and the ones from the supplier before this one, since I had to sell those at a loss to even sell them at all. It will be some time before I can have new 3D printed molds made, which I have been working on for some time, but the print quality from places like Shapeways isn’t high enough for the fine details. I have been saving towards a 3D printer, which I’ve talked about on my Instagram and Facebook before, for when I am ready to print my own doll in 3D. I was looking at the Form2, which is around $3k+, so I am thinking I will just wait until then to offer eyes, molds, etc. It has taken a lot for me to run the shop for the past six months. I work full time for a school, and I go to university as well. Running my shop on top of that has been daunting, and it’s been a struggle all around. I can’t seem to devote enough time to the shop for it to flourish like it needs to. I am honestly on the verge of just stopping Sproutydoll, and when I am finished with my own doll design, I will start up again. It might be under a new name, I have come up with a few designs for a “Prisma Doll” with a diamond and holographic theme, but now I worry that people will think I am changing names to avoid drama, because I am a con, or something else shady.  I am very tired of reading bad anonymous comments about my shop, about my work and about me. Everyone seems to think that I am a big player in the BJD world, that I am being shady and spiteful, and that my quality is terrible and I am overcharging. As a one-person operation, these comments really hurt me. I may just be too sensitive to be involved in this kind of hobby, since I tend to be a very quiet person anyway, and try to stay away from social media as best I can. I really do love making things and having other people appreciate the things I make. I don’t even mind when people have issues and want to get them resolved, but when people say hurtful things through an anonymous filter, it gets me down. When people call me a liar, a cheater, a copycat or a con artist, it upsets me. I love to see people’s photos of their dolls with my products, but recently there’s been a lot of drama and negative comments and it makes it impossible to enjoy the work I do. As it is, I get home from work at 4PM and will usually work on my shop stuff until around 8, then get ready for bed since I have to get up around 5 in the morning for work. All my free time goes towards making things, and as encouraging as it is to see when people share their experiences with my shop and the things I make, it’s hard to remember them when I’m dealing with the drama and the anonymous things that I have been dealing with lately. Even now, I have reworked the overall design of my doll several times (Hence her nearly six-month delay) because I worry what people will say that it’s too similar to this doll, or the joints kind of look like that doll, and that I am a copycat. Some days it’s hard for me to work on the eyes at all, since I still feel the comments that it’s too expensive, amateurish, and that this brand or that brand are a better deal.  I look at other brands and marvel at how nice they look, and feel that I can’t ever match the quality, no matter how many hours I spend on an eye. I do suffer from perfectionism, so I am always trying to find the line between acceptable and overdone. It always feels like the things I do are not good enough, and that the things others do are perfect, and if I could just spend a few more hours trying to figure it out, mine would be perfect, too. This post is getting long, so I will end it here. I am working on an apology to Cubeco since I realize I did not make sure that credit was easy to find.

[warholfig]

oh how i missed going to art exhibits ig: dearbandini 💌