FAQ

Thank you so much for your interest in my experiment to see if the hobby of custom figures is large enough to support factory made customs. Unfortunately, I'm only one guy, so, it would really help if you'd spend a minute or two reading the answers below before contacting me directly ;)

Can you check my tracking information for me / Are there delays?

Yes. There are always delays. This is real life we're talking about. When have things ever gone smoothly? However, these items ship from the Netherlands so it will take at least 15 business days (that's 3 weeks!) to arrive, plus whatever time customs spends on holding it back. US customs, for instance, takes anywhere from 2 days to 5 weeks. And they're allowed to. They have a charter, or something. Some powerful piece of paper that we mere mortals cannot hope to combat. If you ordered over 7 weeks ago, it is time to panic, perhaps, if it hasn't been that long yet, just keep an eye on your tracking.

Sadly, I do not work for the post office nor for customs, so if you have a tracking number then the package is no longer in my possession and I have access to the same tracking info you do.

• If your info hasn't updated in a while, then your package has not cleared customs. US-side tracking does not kick in until your package has cleared customs - nothing either of us can do about that :(
• If your tracking indicates that your package was released by customs, you should receive it within a few days. When you're not home, you need to go to the post office to pick up your package or it will be returned. If you live in the US, your postal worker is very likely to forget to leave a note to tell you this. They are supposed to, but they almost never do. They secretly hate you and the wonderful packages you're getting. So take your tracking info to the post office and have them trace your package.

My backdrops are wrong / I have duplicates / I don't know how to line them up

Both the grate and the palace backdrop are made of two identical pieces of card board. For the grate, hold the pieces up so they look the same, then turn one of them clock wise until the cut strip faces the other way. Slide them together until the grate parts line up, then cut the printing overshoots from the sides with scissors. For the palace backdrop, hold the pieces up so they look identical, then FLIP one piece over and slide then together until they line up. Use scissors to cut the printing overshoots from all sides.

Why don't you sell these for $5 each?

For quality reasons these figures are made in the same factories, with the same quality settings, that the big toy companies use. Sadly, unlike the case for repro figures, the customs hobby doesn't appear to be large enough to actually support factory made figures (the runs are just too small), and that's why we mostly see resin/3D prints in our customs community. The only way to get custom factory made figures is to find someone who is dumb enough to spend all his free time for about a year to produce a figure, and who'll then try to sell them just above cost just to get them made. Lucky for you guys, at least for now, you've found someone dumb enough in me ;)

Are you working on new figures?

Yes. Oh yes!

Can you tell me what they are?

Sometimes you can get a sneak peak on Patreon:

https://patreon.com/thenext17

I'm using the same production facilities as the major toy companies, and the same quality settings, but have to produce in much smaller waves and run sizes, this means that creating a single figure takes tens of thousands of dollars. However, I've set up a Patreon for people who are serious about this hobby and want to share ideas and give constructive input.