It's...real!
TLDR: the pins are absolutely beautiful. Very affordable price even for small orders. I'll be honest, the company looked shady because of communication problems (no direct contact with designer), but it's legit and you will get your product pretty much on time
So, it's my first time making pins. Said pins are gifts from my freshmen class to the graduating class at my college, and because of this I have a somewhat limited budget. I think I chose this company at first because they have a really good price and low MOQ. (I only need 12 pcs, but making 12 pcs at companies with lower MOQs turned out to be much more expensive than making 25 pcs at lapelpinnow).
After paying I regretted not looking around more carefully, because the lapelpinnow website looks suspicious. FAQ page is empty for some reason and I can't find out where their 'real customer reviews' comes from. Anyway, I submitted my design and waited for them to send me the design proof. Two days passed and nothing, so I contacted customer support, who by the way are super responsive (they always reply to the website chat instantly, although email is a little slower), who said that normally it should only take 1-2 hours to get the design proof, so they going to contact the design department and will email me once they hear from them. I said I want to contact the design people directly, but customer support said it's not possible, because they don't have the emails of the designers, but can only leave them messages through the website system, or something like that. Because--take note!--the actual designers/producers are in China, customer support is in India (I think it's India), while the company's headquarters is in Texas. It's a little...convoluted.
I kept bothering customer support, and about the third/fourth day after I made my order, I finally got the design proof, but it's not via email like some other companies, they only sent me a link to the website where you can view your proof and hit approve or request changes in a text box. I requested a few changes and the picture would update pretty fast to reflect the changes but it's not like I was actually talking to the designer, so we never got any direct contact. Fortunately I knew what I wanted and I have some design knowledge on my own so this didn't bother me.
(And here's a theory why it took a while for them to send me the proof. As I was anxiously waiting for my proof I asked quotes from some other companies. One company gave me a proof in a very short time that at first glance looked nice. That same day I also got the proof from lapelpinnow, so I was able to compare. The other company's proof had a aesthetic colour choice, and they even had a rendered view of the final product, which was nice, but upon close inspection they made all the lines the same width, even though in my original design, I intentionally had lines of varying widths for artistic reasons. However, I found that lapelpinnow preserved my varying line widths in their design. I vaguely remember that in vector softwares thin lines of uniform width are easy to achieve by doing an automatic conversion of the pixel image to vector, but if you want the lines to have slightly varying widths you need to slowly edit them manually. If they sent the proof so late because they were being careful with my design, then I applaud lapelpinnow's designers, although it certainly would be nice if they let me know what was happening instead of just giving me radio silence for many days and making me worried.)
When I made the order I chose the delivery date of April 29 (for a little extra money), so by April 26 I contacted customer support again and asked when will ship, and they said they will contact the Chinese people again to check. Later that day I got a email that gave me a tracking number and said my order is shipping on the 27th through FedEx intl priority. But for next three days it was stuck on the 'label created' stage. On May 1, I had to yet again contact customer support, and turned out they gave me the wrong tracking number. The correct tracking number showed that my order did ship on the 27th, it's already in transit and is due to arrive by the 4th. It arrived on the 2nd, earlier than FedEx predictions but later than the date which I selected at first. But I thank myself for having left a generous margin for errors like this, and the pins will still be on time for the event. I feel such relief that the product is in my hands, the gold plating looks expensive, the lines are delicate, the enamel is saturated and colour-accurate. I am a little balder than before because of anxiety, but I got pins that are great quality for the price, and lapelpinnow didn't run away with my money, so I am overall satisfied. But I think if they improve on the several areas I had trouble with, their business could be a lot better.
3 de maio de 2022
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