project-image

Queenie the Kitsune Plush

Created by Amanda Coronado

Preorder store to help fund Queenie the Kitsune Plush, as well as to fund the possible reprint of Floral Frolic (the children's book she's from).

Latest Updates from Our Project:

She's here!!!
over 3 years ago – Sat, Dec 26, 2020 at 11:57:25 PM

Someone FINALLY made her appearance today!

After months of waiting, the Queenies have arrived!

If you'll notice, they are quite squished upon arrival. 

But freed from the box, she fluffs back up nicely.

Some boxes incurred some damage, so we'll be taking the next few weeks to go through everything.  For some lucky backers, we have started shipping things out today!  You should receive a tracking number if you were among this first wave.  We have about 300 individual unique orders to pack, so we ask everyone be patient during this time.  You'll get a tracking email from Backerkit as soon as your order is ready to go!


We will ship out more in the next coming days.  Please give us about a month to two months for us to complete all the shipping.  Due to the mail system being a wreck right now, we are sending all domestic packages out via UPS.  With international packages, it will probably be USPS, so please give her some time to come.  We will be prioritizing UK shipments next to try to dodge those new pesky VAT rules.  I'm hoping we can get the rest of the international orders rolling soon as well.  


Thank you guys for waiting!  We're really happy with how she turned out, and so far, the only problems we've seen are with the plush that were damaged during shipping.  We will try to update again when shipping is complete.  If you have any questions, feel free to shoot me a message; for now, Cari and I are going back to packing these babies up!


Much Holiday Love!

Amanda + Cari

QUEENIE PLUSH IS SHIPPING SOON! CHECK YOUR ADDRESS! CHECK YOUR CARD INFO!
over 3 years ago – Tue, Dec 01, 2020 at 11:41:02 PM

Queenie is done and she is on her way to us!

Ask yourself now:

  •  Have you moved since July? Do you need to update your address in backerkit?
  •  How are your finances? Did you add extras in backerkit? Are you paying for international shipping in backerkit? We are going to be charging the backerkit orders on Friday of this week (December 4), we don’t want to cause you problems by creating an unexpected charge.

So if you need to edit your address or edit your add ons, now is good to do that!


You can also let us know if you just need us to wait to charge your card for add ons until January.  We had originally quoted January for charging cards/shipping.  We know with the holidays around the corner, budgets might be tight right now.  So if you need us to wait until January to charge you for extras, please don’t hesitate to send a message and let us know.  It’s perfectly fine with us.  As a reminder, if you didn’t order extras through Backerkit, you won’t be receiving any extra charges.  This is only if you purchased add ons.


We are wanting to charge cards this Friday so that we can be completely ready to ship these Queenies as fast as possible!!! Because, as everyone is wondering ...


IS QUEENIE ARRIVING BY CHRISTMAS?


You might need to brace yourself that your order is probably *NOT* going to arrive for Christmas. :( BUT. We are going to try very hard to ship Queenie as fast as possible immediately after we receive her! 


We don’t have exact dates for when Queenie will come to us. It’s all kind of unknown until she shows up at the door! The current estimate for her arriving to US ports is mid December.  We are prepping boxes and pins and getting everything ready, but we don’t know exactly what day we will receive Queenie. I’m sure you can imagine this year is insane, all of everything is in the mail, and every mail service is over burdened and slow. It all just drags everything slower and slower. If this wasn’t Christmas, of 2020, during a giant pandemic, everything would be happening faster.


If you need your order by Christmas, we do have the B Grade Queenies! If you want to switch out for one of those we can definitely do that. Please let us know your needs?


We also posted B Grade Queenies up on Etsy, it might be easier to buy from than backerkit.

Lastly, we have a new pretty art here of Queenie and Dawnsing!

Thank you for all your support of our project and our characters! The funding has made it possible for us to do this big new order of Queenies! And for us to create a new piece of them! Thank you. c:


Hopefully in a few weeks in mid December, we will be posting an update that we have finally received Queenie! We'll see~~~


Thank you for reading, and thank you for your continued patience waiting for these foxes!!!

A Bouquet of Queenies
over 3 years ago – Sun, Sep 27, 2020 at 09:51:25 PM

Hello!  We finally have news to update you all on regarding Queenie!

Introducing! New and Improved!

With the old factory not making an apparent efforts to fix the problem order, we have moved onto a new factory.  This is the same place that did a wonderful job making the Shiba keychains for us.  They remade Queenie within about 2 weeks (!?!) and were able to fix the problem fur by replacing it with a shorter length one (something we repeatedly asked old factory to do, but they won't?  For some reason?).  Not only does this new fur shed a lot less, but they've pumped up her tail stuffing for an extra plump, fluffy tail.  Additionally, they are allowing us to do something really great!!  Multiple colors of Queenie!

New Queenie! And new friends!!

We are happy to introduce to you all: Ice Blue Queenie and Sakura Pink Queenie!

The new colorways also feature cute embroidery on one side of her body!  Ice has snowflakes and Sakura has flowers. 

Additionally, her tail fur and face embroidery have been colored to match each theme!

Backerkit has been working hard this past week to make adjustments to all surveys to make it possible for backer's to request new colors of Queenies.  We are really grateful that they took the time to help us with this (it took a week of coding to get this ready, thus the delay on the update)!  

How do you request a new color?  Go here to retrieve your survey!  If you want to stick with Red, no problem!  You don't need to do anything.  The coding involved should default your survey to Red.  However, we're only human working on this, so if you find any errors, please let us know.


If you've placed a preorder through Backerkit (not kickstarter), you should have received an email from us regarding switching (these have to be done manually).  Additionally, you can also add on more Queenies if needed.


B Grade Queenies (Queenies with laser burns) are also up for anyone interested.  If you were interested in adopting one of these babies, head on over to the Backerkit store to order one (we will be shipping these as we receive the orders).  Backers who request one of these "B Grade Queenies" will receive a $10 credit and will have their orders ship ASAP (provided you have not ordered an updated Queenie, please place a separate order if you want both and we will ship them separately).  The $10 credit for Backers can be used to select another item (sticker sheet, etc.) from the campaign to make up for the loss.  Please note, we cannot offer refunds for the $10 amount. 


If you requested a B Grade Queenie previously, I will try to contact you this week (on the to-do list!)

We hope you will all find this news as exciting and hopeful as we do!  We've already begun the process of having these made, including paying for new safety testing.  They are already in production as we speak!  We don't have an eta on when they will be complete, but I expect we should have them by early next year.   We'll make another update when these babies are ready for their boat trip to us!


Thanks for waiting!

Amanda & Cari


PS Forgot to add- Book reprints are in production!  They should be finishing up very soon!  Thank you so much for the support! 

The Trouble with Queenie
over 3 years ago – Sun, Aug 16, 2020 at 08:15:01 PM

It’s August! It is the planned month of delivery! Time for an update!

Pins pins and pins!

Unfortunately it is going to be a difficult update for us to write, because A LOT HAS GONE WRONG. And much of what has gone wrong is still waiting on solutions.

Here is a list of all the newly made things that need to be completed for this Kickstarter:

Queenie plush
4 sticker sheets
3 tarot fox enamel pins
2 jingle fox enamel pins
1 shiba keychain
Reprint Floral Frolic

Alright I’m going to skip straight to the worst of all the problems: the order of Queenies arrived to us in terrible condition, and at this point, we feel we cannot in good conscience ship them out to all of you.

The problem: the fur on Queenie’s neck and ears had to be laser cut to be the correct length (NO ONE TOLD US THIS WAS BEING DONE) and the result is all this fur has laser burns. The laser burns are big chunks of melted, blackened synthetic fur. The result basically looks like Queenie has fleas. It is mind blowing that the manufacturer thought this was fine to send out.  In addition, some plush were burned in the process of the laser trimming and have large black burns on them.

An example of Queenie's laser burns.

Why the problem has occurred in one word: COVID 19. Yaaaay. I’ll go more in depth. We paid for Queenie back in March, as soon as manufacturers were ready to return to work. We figured they would be very slow to get things done, but that’s fine, we might as well pay for the project and wait in line. It did not occur to us that the manufacturer would let their quality slip so severely. Our plush are manufactured through Shinedown Productions/Plush Me. They are a US based agent working with a manufacturer in China. They organize a lot of orders for a lot of small creators like us. They cost extra compared to direct to manufacturer would cost, and frequently working with an additional person in the middle has slowed down the process. But we thought it would all be worth it because Shinedown has insured good quality. They’ve done most of our other orders (Dawnsing, Rawra, Finna birb), as well as countless other plush for other artists, which have all been well made, good quality plush. I think this order went wrong because back in March, in China, manufacturers were just going through a huge disaster and production quality suffered.  Fabric typically available, was out of stock, staff were not available to work due to quarantine restrictions, etc.

The burned areas are embedded in the fur of her ears and chest, and can not easily be removed.

It is an incredible disaster for us because we have been working since 2015 to make this design happen. I will not chronicle here everything that went wrong in those 5 years because it’s too frustrating.

We finally trusted Shinedown and their manufacturer in this process enough that they would deliver a good project and we could run a kickstarter with certainty that orders would be fulfilled.  Additionally, we reviewed preproduction photos, but those photos were taken in a way to hide the problem.

It’s really hard to even write this update because of how much this kickstarter meant to us. It meant we would be able to survive. That future feels less certain now. We’ve both had many nights of being in tears over this kickstarter, and so we haven’t written an update. But we’re trying to get it done now because we know everyone needs to find out what has happened.

WHAT IS THE SOLUTION? Right now we are giving Shinedown time to talk to their manufacturer. It takes time to work out big problems like this. Initially the manufacturer offered us a pretty small refund and told us we should just go use a blow dryer to clean all the plush (the laser burns are melted plastic, they don’t blow out, they can only be cut out.) After more photos of the problem and videos of how it cannot just be blow dried out, the manufacturer has agreed to remake the order and we will pay the freight cost again on it.  Once again, the freight will cost us approximately $3000.

Right now they must go through the process of finding materials and doing another production sample. That will take a few weeks.

What is gonna be done with all these laser burn foxes? Well 63 Queenies (we had to go through the full order and count up what was good and what was bad) are actually pretty decent. Once they’re brushed out the laser burns are pretty minimal and only require an unnoticeable amount of trimming to remove. So we have 63 good Queenies.

Some Queenie's can be salvaged with combing and hair trimming.

That means we have 436 bad Queenies. The laser burns are significant enough that we would need to cut a lot of her long fur off to get her presentable.  Additionally, some Queenies are in such a condition that it will take some effort to fix them (removing stains, resewing areas, etc.)

All of this, of course, includes us doing hours, days, even weeks, of fox haircuts and maintenance.

We think the laser burned, hair cut Queenies would sell for a discount. They would be ‘B Grade Queenies’ and we may list them on Etsy at some point in the near future because we will need to try and get a small bit of money back from them, as well as freeing up our storage space for new orders of Queenie. But sadly these B Grade Queenies are definitely not the quality we want to send to our kickstarter backers. We want you to have the best plush. We want you to finally have this fox some of you have wanted for *years* in as high quality a state as possible.

I don’t know if this is a bright side or not, but the shiba keychain is the first plush we’ve ever had completed while working directly with a manufacturer. No middle man. The order of shiba keychains came out really good! It’s a pretty big plunge with a new relationship, but we have mailed Queenie and Dawnsing samples to the shiba keychain manufacturer and we will be paying them to make a sample of these already completed designs. It would probably take months to have finished designs with a new manufacturer, but we think it will be worth the effort.

We aren’t sure which manufacturer, new or old, will manage to get a high quality Queenie done first. We are just starting the process over twice in the hope that a result will be reached as quickly as possible without quality suffering again.

WHAT SHOULD YOU DO RIGHT NOW? Right now we all just wait. We wait and see what the new production sample looks like from Shinedown. We wait to see if the new manufacturer can handle the pattern and remake it pretty well.

DO YOU ABSOLUTELY NEED YOUR QUEENIE PLUSH RIGHT NOW? We do have 63 good ones. If you need your Queenie in time for Christmas, please let us know by filling out this form.  We realize some people are giving this plush to a child who might enjoy her regardless of looks (or might even enjoy making up a story about her battle with lasers).  Some people also find misfit plush to have character, and don’t mind the issue.

If this is you, please fill out the form.  We will try to send you a groomed plush (or a rogue one, if you prefer). If you are okay with waiting, ignore the form.

If you are okay with waiting, if you can possibly wait, you don’t need to do anything (ignore the form). We are hoping that a second run of Queenies will result in a superior quality product. But if you need Queenie right now, the 63 good Queenies are definitely good little plush and we will mail you one. The 63 good ones are going to be first come first served. But again, if you can possibly wait until next year for Queenie, we think the better quality 2nd run might be worth the wait.

We wish we had more info to give you right now. Like how long it will take to solve the problem. Or how promising the new prototypes at a new manufacturer are. But those things will just take time to sort out.

We are really incredibly sorry that this has happened. ;_; We pride ourselves on shipping etsy orders quickly and always trying to get the things people order delivered as fast as it can be done. We always want to meet the deadline! ;_; And today, it is out of our hands. I don’t want to say it, but this is also financially damaging for us. It’s a huge wreck. It’s awful. I don’t know. Honestly everything in the world is so awful, it’s hard to feel any worse about it, so instead we’re both mostly numb about it.

Anyway, we want to update you as well on the other items being newly made for this kickstarter:

Shiba keychain is done! He’s very round and cute!!!

4 tarot enamel pins are done! The full orders of them will be arriving at different times throughout August.

Tarot pins!

We also are manufacturing the Strength tarot pin even though that stretch goal did not quite get reached. It’s available as an add on in the backerkit shop.

Strength!

Jingle Fox enamel pins are done! The full order has arrived to us! We are waiting on the backing cards to be reprinted because the gloss coating had a bunch of white filmy bubbles in it (more manufacturing errors ….)

The 4 sticker sheets

Well. This order sure went wrong. There are lots of sticker printers, EVENTUALLY SOMEONE IS GOING TO PRINT THESE STICKERS. First we worked with one printer, their samples looked great! And then they printed the full order, and the stickers were all VERY PIXELATED. So now we’re trying a new printer. The new printer mailed us samples. We received the samples, opened the envelope, AND IT WAS SOMEONE ELSE’S ORDER. We were able to mail this order to the person it belongs to, so I’m glad. They also received our new sticker samples, and they have mailed our new sticker samples to us! But new sticker samples are trapped on USPS and have been not moving because of …. Everything that’s happening with USPS …. They’ll come eventually! I hope.

REPRINT FLORAL FROLIC

We've just finished reviewing full color proofs of the interior and cover!

We didn’t reach this stretch goal either, but so many people wanted books that we decided to reprint them! We had made this commitment financially when we reached 70 backerkit orders (and were not aware of the impending Queenie issues).  Here are color proofs, they look good! It hurts to pay for this $11500 print job, be working on it, and then receive an order of bad Queenies and be faced with paying ???? how much??? For new Queenies???? Ok we aren’t going to earn any money to survive on from this project, BUT IF WE CAN JUST GET PRODUCT AT ALL IT WILL BE A VICTORY. I give up on surviving please I just want to see the thing get made. ;_;

If you are interested in a book, please have a look at the backerkit preorders. We will continue to leave the Backerkit shop open; all orders are also open, so you can add or remove items as you desire.  We will send out a two week warning once we are planning to charge everyone.  So you won't be charged during this uncertain time if you've placed or are placing an order.

We are working on getting everything together. I’m sorry that this update reads as frazzled and frustrated. ;_;

We are going to be shipping out the $10 sticker tier and the $25 enamel pin tier towards the end of August or beginning of September. (This assumes I can finally shake stickers out of any printer at all, but I will keep doing my best.) So these orders are locked in Backerkit and have been charged.

Right now we haven’t locked any of the other orders that include Queenie or Floral Frolic so you can still go back and change your addresses.

I’m sorry this update doesn’t have more firm information because progress takes time. ;_; We desperately wish we had firm solutions or information. We will post more updates in the coming weeks and months on how solutions are going.

Again, we’re sorry that this project has been so incredibly cursed. ;_; Thank you to anyone who is willing to stay with us while we struggle through this difficult time.  Thanks for hanging in there.

Cari & Amanda

ps. here are some close ups of the tarot pins, they turned out really pretty!

Information about Surveys
almost 4 years ago – Mon, Jun 22, 2020 at 07:23:54 PM

Hello everyone!

Just a heads up, surveys will be going out very soon!  We are dividing surveys into 3 groups: $345+ backers, $145-$68 backers, and $48 and below backers.  This will give everyone a fair shot at some of the limited items.  I will send $345+ backer surveys tonight!  When most of those folks have selected their items, I will move onto the next group (and so on, and so forth).  

Please do not sit on your survey so we can get accurate counts of items.  You can always go back and edit your survey, as well as add other items until July 15th.

If you received a Beta Survey (i.e. smoke test survey) and you purchase add ons, please note there was an error with shipping in which it was charging some backers $3 instead of $5 for shipping.  This has been adjusted and should be working properly now. If you ordered something with $3 shipping, please note it will be charging $5 now.  Sorry for the confusion. 

There was a confusion over scarf colors.  Please view the color chart on the listing to choose the color of scarf you want.

As a side note, if you purchased extra add ons with your survey, you will not be charged until July 15th for your extra.  You can also make edits to your order, change address, etc. until that date.  After July 15th, your orders will be locked and we won't be able to refund you.

Alternately, if  you had to drop your pledge at the end of Kickstarter, you will receive a survey, in case you wanna jump back on board.  I realize time changes everything when it comes to finances, so there are no obligations to rejoin the campaign if it's not in your budget.

While we can't guarantee all requests, if you want to leave a note for us in your survey.  Please choose the 'leave a comment' answer for the last survey question.  This would be requests like: you selected a tier with a book and don't need a copy.  Please note: we can't do split shipping on orders because of the cost, so we won't be able to honor split shipping requests. If you want to send a friend a gift, the purchase has to be made separately with separate shipping. c:

  The request question looks like this (if no requests, select 'got it').

Let us know if you have any questions!  Thanks for waiting!

Amanda & Cari