I got confirmation that the gold plated pins will finally ship out to me tomorrow! Hopefully that means all the plating issues have been resolved and I can get right into sorting them out for packing as soon as I get them.
Which leads me on to charging cards for add-ons/shipping/tariffs!
The pins will take a week to get here and need grading/checking before I can move forward with all backers rewards. Once July hits though I am going to be a bit on the busy side (right into events and a family trip) so cards will most likely be charged the 2nd week (or if things get crazy busy, the 3rd week) in July with the aim to ship them out asap. I don't want to charge cards before I have the gold plated pins on hand and can confirm we aren't going to have any extra issues.
I will update when I have the gold plated pins and shipping details sorted on my end.
I will be quality checking/grading them all over the coming week or so (The photos are just random pulls without being checked or cleaned haha) I am hoping to hear more updates on the gold plated pins before the month end but depending on how things went there might still be a wait for them.
I will figure out shipping in the interim (As I have a pin of each design I can calculate shipping pretty accurately) with the intention of charging for shipping and USA tariff fees in early July. (Fingers crossed!) I will post about shipping related thins before I charge cards and whatnot so no need to worry about it yet!
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.
