EDIT: From talking with friends, it seems as a whole my intentions were misinterpreted by a lot of people (I believe this is my own fault). I won't lay out exactly where things went wrong or how I still have issues, as I think it'll just be misinterpreted again and this discussion is not worth having at this point. I regret not running my post by some of my buddies to make sure my intentions were clear and read properly.
I'll close this out by clearing up a few things that hopefully won't invite potential controversy:
- I do not expect 100% QA perfection from any company or organization. I have worked in multiple types of customer service, where I both had control and no control over the product quality, as well as had my own failings dealing with customers.
- I never expected any RGL entity to shut down the entire store because of a single listing. Just because the sticker listing and actual product I received is messed up does not mean that the shirts are bad.
- I do not believe Mothership should be replaced/fired/transferred/punished/etc.
- I do not believe RGL is fundamentally broken or flawed or that the people running the org don't give a shit.
- This was not intended to be an RGL bashing post; I gave you the backstory of my customer interaction to hopefully let you understand why I felt the need to make this post to protect other consumers. While I am annoyed at certain things, bashing RGL was not the point of this post.
Cheers.
RGL refuses to take this item off the store: be warned now and later of potentially low quality items!
I ordered these TF2 Monuments stickers off of the official RGL merchandise store. I paid a total of 17$ (listed price of 13 + shipping).
You can note from the listing image itself, they appear a little weird. I figured they were just displayed like that due to some weird Teespring store glitch and assumed they were two separate stickers. You wouldn't want text arbitrarily sideways.
When my shipment arrived, here is what I received. This photo was taken with a Pixel 7; a recent phone with a notably high quality camera. I'd say the pictures are quite representative of the item itself. Here is an alternate image with a book with large and small text (for checking my camera quality), as well as a Post It note for scale.
You can first note how the stickers are stuck together. There is no tiny cut or anything that lets you use them separately; in order to use them separately, as obviously intended, you have to cut a perfectly straight line yourself to separate the stickers which is absurd.
Next, you can note the low quality of the stickers themselves; I believe that the source GFX itself is quite high res, but a low res printer was used, resulting in an incredibly poor quality image, making them unusable.
While getting a refund (which I started 8 AM Monday and is not finished yet (this is a Teespring return process, not RGL, to be clear)), I decided to open a support ticket to recommend removal of this item from the store.
The following two images are excerpts of the conversations I had with RGL (edit: the RGL Marketing Director specifically); I would go back and get more screenshots but the ticket was closed without it being my choice.
Dated 10/14/23 5:10 PM CST
https://i.imgur.com/fRAsRvE.png
Dated 10/16/23 5:39 PM CST
https://i.imgur.com/Jf5VPVy.png
To recap: they admit it is low quality and that they're looking into other options. In the meantime, they will not take this product off of their official storefront. They cannot do anything about refunds, so if you get the item and you don't like it (you won't), you have to then go through the hassle of returning the item.
So for some reason, it's not RGL's problem that their product quality was not vetted and that you have to wait a week, get the item, realize how dogshit it is, then return it through a poor return process. That's your problem!
RGL, this is business 101. You don't put products on shelves that you aren't willing to back. As a result, I am extremely unhappy with my service and will not buy from your storefront again. I'm not making this tf.tv post because I'm unhappy though; I'm making it to alert other potential customers of the experience I've had, especially because you won't take this item off your storefront despite directly saying the item is low quality.