inner hatch
My experience with Juniper creates
As you know, juniper is new merch company vedal is working with. They released vedal fumo, lava lamp, reversible shirts and themed fumos along with accessories. And also you can buy Evil birthday merch right now.
Out of past three only vedal fumo arrived to Russia. When it become obvious that they couldn't deliver Lava lamps they gave a choice a refund or reship to different location. For most of the Russians refund isn't an option because we are disconnected from SWIFT and resort to paying by proxy or using temp cards. Reshipping worked, and some even managed to get their lamps into Russia despite juniper saying it's not possible. (pic 9)
Then there was subathon merch. My friend reached out to juniper and they confirmed that it should be no problem getting merch in Russia, that the restriction applied only to lava lamps. (Pic 1). Everyone happily ordered merch and waited. Then suddenly juniper said they are issuing refund and that it is not possible to deliver merch to Russia. And there's a big problem that this time there was no way to choose reshipping. It was an automatic refund. Which resulted in some of my friends just loosing money due to before mentioned nuances of payment methods(Pic 2). Not exactly blaming juniper for that, but it left a sour taste.
Merch quality and shipping
I have no complaints about the merch that I got. But it's probably because I received only vedal plush out of 3 past drops. The price to ship to Russia was about the same as makeship.
But some other members of community have their complaints they can't voice themselves:
-
The shipping:
Prices for fumos are higher than makeship had (pic 3 and 4). And given that, plushies are vacuum sealed instead of being shipped in a themed bag sometimes resulting in the plushies being damaged if packaged improperly (example pic 5 of crumpled ribbons on Evil's head). -
The quality of the merch
Very varied quality of the merch. Most of the clothing seems to have little to no issues, the lava lamp merch had a huge manufacturing flaw resulting in the immediate yellow colour which apparently wasn't present in the prototypes that Vedal and the person working on the Swarm Sync app received (Pic 6, 7, 8). Plushies seem very inconsistent with stuffing which mostly results in their chin not being full and having wrinkles. (Example: https://www.reddit.com/r/NeuroSama/comments/1sczk4w/i_took_my_neuro_plushiejuniper_version_to_get/) The size of their clothing seems inconsistent between the plushies. Some of the buyers reported their plushies having defects like very visibly shorter legs. -
Merch inconsistent with what was said on stream
Vedal mentioned multiple times on stream that the new plushies were supposed to be bigger by about 20-30%. One of the reasons was to make it more reliable to put the Tutel plush on their heads.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z14LubJKDLI&t=5908s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5PVUZ6BlpVA&t=6001s
We could also see that the size of the cancelled Evil plushie was indeed bigger (10.2 x 11 x 7.9 inches compared to current 9.1 x 8.3 x 6.3 inches). The current size of the plushies is almost identical to the Makeship ones. Why was that change made and why wasn't this communicated to us in any way? Many people bought those plushies assuming that they are going to be bigger based on the statements made on stream by Vedal. If a change in design was made, it should be properly mentioned on stream.
So the list of questions:
- Will shipping be re-added to unavailable countries? Specifically to UAE, since the problem with airports is solved now. And if no then why? Also I'll ask if shipping to Russia will ever return?
- Will something be done with ridiculous pricing for some countries, or there's nothing that can be done to bring price to makeship levels?
- What about quality of plushies, will it get better and consistent? And is it possible to ship in bags as makeship did instead of vacuum packaging?
pallid nova