The community support is encouraging! It means a lot to me to see you guys cheer these efforts on.
Vaux wrote:
Looks like your turning into a vendor yourself, at this rate, you'll be pumping out ANH helmets left, right and center!!!
Whoa, time out there, fella!
I'm just a sculptor. I don't have the means to even make a mold, let alone create quantities like you're implying, but thanks for the boost!
My long term goal is not to become a vendor. This is not to say all vendors are bad, but the ones that have caused the community pain are the ones that set themselves up as perpetual vendors (like some that are on eBay). When they show photos of a prop, it's not necessarily something they have ready to ship, but it's a photo of a past product that's only representative of what they're selling - but you and I have no way of knowing that. Let's say you click on the "Buy it Now" button. The vendor then takes the money and start acquiring materials and then, basically, builds to order.
If he can't get the materials in time, then delays happen, and delivery gets pushed out. Worse, if he spend sthe money before he produces, he then has to wait for another person (victim) to buy in order to have money to acquire materials (read: Ponzi scheme).
There are vendors who may have meant well starting out, but due to mismanagement of time, resources and money, they delay delivery. I don't know about you, but expecting a 30 day turnaround and waiting over 1 year is just completely unacceptable.
There are some fellow fans who, like me, have been victims of other vendors, and they try to be better vendors themselves. I'm more of the category of being a fan artist who just wants to help out other fellow fans who have been down on their luck. In fact, some of them have been very patient with Goldie's progress over the years, and they are people whose fortunes I'd love to see finally changed. To help them, my goal is to simply do a short run of these. And learning how vendors make the mistake of taking money up front and not delivery, I'll put up my own money and wont' take a cent until these are completed, photographed, and ready to be put in boxes and shipped out - just like what various fan artists on the RPF have done themselves.
I have a day job and a career, and this is simply a hobby - but with a charity purpose, because I do want to help a fellow fan financially who has fought through things like cancer and other physical ailments - who, after purchasing pain medication for her body, usually finds it difficult to make ends meet, and I'd like to her to eat something other than peanut butter and bread. So although I don't know what the future looks like past the limited run I'm planning, I know that I do want to see that fellow fan continually blessed, if possible. I spoke with T-VIRUS (the one helping me with molding and casting this run - as we both met on the basis of being victims of the SAME vendor) and we agree that we want to leave the Vader aspect of the hobby better than when we entered it. As to what that future looks like, it depends on how many people want to change the culture of the hobby with me. I'm open to working with vendors to give fellow fans some affordable and good quality options that didn't exist when I first entered the hobby - provided that they believe in my vision and charity endeavor, and will purpose to have good business management and not take advantage of fellow fans.
One final thought is that Goldie, to me, is not so much as a prop but the product of a journey. In reading these posts, fellow fans have
journeyed with me in my endeavor of turning something bad around into something good - it's thus not just a win for me but a win for anyone who has ever been taken advantage of by a vendor. My view is that a casting of something like Goldie is a keepsake of that journey. Hope that makes sense.