-This is not a review, it's a personal cosplay experience that I want to share.. What seemed like a simple order turned into three months of silence and fear that I'd wasted my money on a suit I wouldn't receive.
The result? Well, I'll tell you in detail, because if I've already suffered, at least let it serve as an anecdote 😅✨
First, I should clarify that I've been cosplaying since I was 12 years old. I'm 26 now, so I've had many years of experience ordering costumes from different stores, but this time was different.
Last year, in the first few months of the year, I decided to cosplay Catnap. Catnap is a character from the horror game and the villainous protagonist of Poppy Playtime Chapter 3. It's a game I've grown to really like, so I decided I wanted to cosplay one of my favorite characters from the game.
I don't make my own costumes, and that's because I only cosplay for fun. I don't mind entering contests or showing off to someone; I just want to have fun playing characters I like. So, like many of my costumes, I buy them or have them made.
This wasn't the first time I ordered from this store. I'd already ordered another costume, gloves, slippers, and stuffed animals, so I definitely wrote to them to place another order. A kigurumi costume, a pair of slippers, a pair of gloves, and a stuffed animal. The order was finalized, payment was made, and everything was fine.
🖍️This is a drawing I made of how I wanted my outfit.
The problem starts when a month passes and there's no sign of communication. Month two arrives and all I get is a message from the delivery person or the manager writing that the orders are delayed and that he's there to answer questions. They told me something like, "Because my order was one of the largest, that's why it would be delayed longer."
And I'm like, okay, fine. Personally, I don't care if an order takes 3, 4, 5, or 6 months. What matters to me is communication and knowing how my order is going, being informed. It's been 3 months and nothing. I looked for the person's profile on other social media because obviously they didn't answer anywhere and their profiles were private. I understand that this may be for privacy reasons, and that's fine, but when you work on social media and your profiles are private, it can sometimes cause some distrust.
Anyway, I couldn't find a way to contact the person because they weren't answering on the website or in the chat. At this point, I was upset and scared that this person had kept my money and was planning to disappear from social media because, of course, I wasn't the only one who had made a request; they had other people's money.
Until one day, I saw the person appear online, and on top of that, they no longer had their brand logo on their image. So, at this point, everything was already giving me a bad feeling, haha. The thing is, I write to them, and I'm not expressly happy about it, which seems reasonable to me. I'm not a conflictive person in the sense that I'm not going to insult and cause trouble, but I do know how to defend myself and I don't stay silent about things. Courtesy doesn't take away from bravery.
It turns out I wrote to the person who wanted to know about my order. It had been three months without any answers, and at the very least, all I wanted was communication, no matter how long the suit took. My words weren't rude, but I knew the complaint was evident in them.
The person from the store sent me a statement basically telling me she was seriously ill. She scolded me as if I were a bad person for not knowing her situation, and that's where I'm going. How was I supposed to know this person was in poor health? I'm not a fortune teller. If she had told me, hey, I was in poor health, and that's why I hadn't been able to work or write, I would have apologized and told her I was upset because she didn't know about my order, but that I was fine. I understood. I work online from home, and I understand when these things happen.
But this person then apologizes to me because he tells me that he went into the Instagram chat and realized that no one had contacted me since apparently someone was supposed to inform me of what was happening with my order and they didn't, at this point I didn't even want that suit anymore and if I really were a bad person I would have told him that I no longer wanted the suit and that he return my money because really after the bad experience I really did not want the suit anymore, due to the problems he told me he was going through I decided to leave things like that, it took another week to send me the suit, I simply limited myself to yes and ok while I finished seeing the shipment and so on.
Say You're Fine When You're Not
When the package arrived, I didn't even want to take out the costume. My mom was curious to see it, so I took it out and showed her everything. After that, I put it back in its box and left it in a corner of my room. Two months passed, and a convention was coming up, so I figured, well, I should at least break it in since I'd bought the wig, contact lenses, easy paint, and everything, so just for those things, I'd wear it.
I put it on and I really liked it. Plus, it received a lot of attention and affection at the convention. People really loved my cosplay, and that made everything more enjoyable.
📸Cosplay photos, I have better photos but I will make other entries about this cosplay so I will save them for that one.
I really don't know if I was wrong, I paid a considerable amount for the suit, I am from Venezuela, many of us know how the situation is here, collecting money to continue enjoying our hobbies whenever we can is a very big effort for many, I paid in full, and after 3 months I decided to complain and although the anger was noticeable in my words I never insulted, I did not like how this person answered me and as soon as he delivered my order, I stopped following his pages, deleted his WhatsApp and decided not to buy from his store anymore.
Fortunately, I found another store that offers the same service. I've already placed two orders, and everything went super smoothly. The service was excellent, and the manager was super friendly.
I hope my anecdote was entertaining. For the record, I never mentioned anyone's name or anything. I'm not interested in harming anyone's work or image; these are just things that happen, and I wanted to share them. Anyway, I survived. And the costume, although it took a while to arrive, at least made for a nice photo and a story I can now tell, adding to the many experiences I've had as a cosplayer.
