Leather Suspenders Length Issue
If you received your Samuel Plush after April 15, 2023, and you found the suspenders you received measure differently from the original design, you are not receiving a defective order. Please find more details here.
Quick Summary
There was an assembly error at the factory related to leather suspenders manufactured in October 2022. This error caused for the back strap of the suspenders to be overly long, leading to an aesthetically unpleasant appearance. We discovered this issue in April 2023.
Is my order affected?
- If you purchased a Spencer Plush after November 2022 and your order was shipped before April 15, 2023, your order may be affected by this issue.
- If you purchased a Samuel Plush in 2023 and your order was shipped before April 15, 2023, your order may be affected by this issue.
What's the extent of the issue?
The issue is relatively easy to notice. While it doesn't affect the appearance of the plush from the front side, an uncoordinated look is significant from the back and from the sides.
Is there any compensation?
We're offering a free replacement for the leather suspenders to customers who received a defective copy. Please refer to the Details section for more details on how to identify defective suspenders.
The replacement suspenders will be an updated design. Please refer to our design improvement page for more details. We expect to ship the replacements in June 2023.
How can I claim my compensation?
Please fill out this form with all of the required details, and we will send you a new version of the suspenders free of charge.
To expedite the process, please ensure that the photos show the wrong shaped central piece and/or the measurement of the back strap. The example photo belows showcases the correct length of the back strap (35mm). Your suspenders are defective if the back strap is longer than 35mm:
If you have difficulty in finding a ruler, you may also take a side photo of your plush wearing the suspenders. If your suspenders are defective, it should be easily identifiable from the photo. The plush photo in the Details section below gives a good example.
Details
The following diagram illustrates the correct measurements for our leather suspenders:
The defective suspenders have the back strap (the shortest belt of the three in the diagram) overly long. From the samples we received, the length ranges from 45 to 55 mm, while the design length is just 35mm. The defective suspenders also come with an irregularly-shaped central piece when it's supposed to be a left-right symmetrical hexagon. A photo below shows the difference between decent suspenders and defective ones:
An overly long back strap on Samuel as seen in the photo below:
How did this happen?
We are unable to determine exactly how it happened because we had already terminated our partnership with the at-fault factory in January 2023 due to other quality concerns. We didn't receive any report from our customers about this issue until April 2023 after we launched our Discord server. It appears that most of the affected customers did not consider this as an issue in quality.
After receiving the reports, we inspected our Spencer Plush stock on hand and found a number of defective suspenders. From the pattern we found, we believe that the factory failed to follow the exact standard while producing the second batch of suspenders in October 2022. It is likely that the factory workers who were responsible for the production line was told to produce the suspenders following the first batch, but they were not told that the products should follow exact measurements. This factory had shown a history of poor operation management, leading to the reasoning behind the termination of our partnership.
Samuel Pre-Orders
Since terminating our cooperation with the at-fault factory in January 2023, we switched to a new factory to produce the remaining leather suspenders for Samuel Pre-Orders placed in January. The plushies were ready at our California warehouse since March 2023, and we were waiting for the suspenders to arrive until April 14, the day we received them. Because of the defects found in the previous batch, we paid extra attention to this new batch and conducted a thorough inspection.
Unfortunately, though the new suspenders are of good quality, we found that the factory misunderstood the design diagram and made all three belts in the suspenders 5mm longer than the original design. This is a different issue from the one described in the previous section, but it causes a similar issue and results in an undesirable appearance.
Since it's not feasible to send the suspenders back to the factory for correction, we decided to correct the issue ourselves. As one of our team members has good experience in leatherwork, we have established a workflow to shorten the backstrap of all the suspenders on hand while still aiming to make the April shipping schedule. Our modification will also follow the guidelines from the updated design, which makes the back strap closer to the body instead of being raised up a little bit. A photo of Samuel wearing our modified suspenders is shown below:
If you're reading this part of the notice and you haven't received your Samuel Plush yet, please be assured that we're working hard to ensure the suspenders' quality. This will be our first "hand-made" product ever, and we hope you like it!
