Reaper Finally Responds to my Questions about Model Quality for New Kickstarter

Reaper finally replied to my questions about the model quality from the last kickstarter and how they were addressing it in the new one:

Reaperbryan, on 09 Oct 2013 - 10:04 AM, said:

We have said many times that we are working with our manufacturer to reduce/remove such defects from future products.  We have shown them samples of what we sent versus what was received, and they are aware now, and can do what they need to do to fix it in the future.

When I check all posts by you, I several other posts about this topic, so clearly it is one that concerns you greatly.  As such, I will try to address it.

We sent hundreds of models to China at once for them to make molds of. We do not know if they took shortcuts, if they made actual mistakes, or if the figures themselves just for one reason or another when being scanned in and then burned into the steel had something about them that caused them not to work as well.  Reaper did not make the molds, nor do we have the expertise in house to have even attempted such a thing.  Our manufacturer has not been forthcoming with details as to why, and to us, the why is irrelevant - what is relevant is that we are confident that they know how to prevent it or to reduce the impact in the future.

Beyond that, we made a full and public disclosure that there were problems with certain models.  We fulfilled our obligations, and immediately cancelled the worst offenders, leaving us with thousands of models we cannot sell in our inventory.  We can ill-afford to make this mistake many more times, so it is absolutely something we are very interested in correcting.

We have no guarantees that such a thing could never happen again.  We cannot make such a guarantee as long as the molding and manufacturing are contracted out - a process we continue to work to reduce or eliminate.  What we can do is what we *always* have done - and that is we stand behind our product.  We received hundreds of e-mails about the noses of the models with no noses.  Every consumer received a refund for that models MSRP.  Note that this is more than the per-figure that they paid via Kickstarter.  As good copies do not exist, we could not replace them, but we could make it right.  And in the future, we will continue this practice - it is the right thing to do for our customers.

If you are concerned that the project will not provide a good enough value (as measured in terms of quality of model, not quantity) then you are free not to back the project, and wait until you can do a visual inspection of the figures before making purchasing decisions. 

So they do not know exactly what went wrong since the whole master to mold to models was outsourced but they feel that they have expressed the issues to the manufacturer so that it will not be repeated.   Probably in the rush to fulfill the kickstarter they did properly inspect production samples for all the molds before getting the models produced since they had good luck with their previous Bones.

To go back to the sausage making analogy, Reaper decided the flavor profiles then had someone else develop the recipe and make the sausages and Reaper might have tasted some of the sausages they only checked that everything was a sausage.

The difference we see in peoples view is that the first reaper kickstarter was either a whole bunch of miniatures cheap or a whole bunch of cheap miniatures.