Does the hobby stress you out sometimes?

Deep breaths. I also make sure I do ample amounts of research before I purchase anything. If at any point of time the merchandise will not get to me before my paypal protection runs out I contact the company.

As for clothing, I started venturing into making it myself or only buying what is in stock when I go shopping. That way I only have to wait for it to be shipped and if the shipping doesn't happen in a timely manner I send a message and establish a deadline. If the company/business/seller does not meet said deadline I open a paypal dispute and let paypal handle it.

 

Hey, I hear ya. I have a few dolls sitting around incomplete and it's bothering me to the point were I don't really wanna do anything with any of my dolls. XP
I'm sorry some of the companies are seeming shady right now. I'd email them at least weekly and nag. Expensive item plus long wait time definitely warrants concern and you deserve to know the status of your items.

 

I just start with this hobby but yea first arrival and I get to know about dealing with costum fees =.=

 

I wouldn’t say stressed as much as frustrated.

I see so many really ‘finished’ dolls and then I look at some of my poor guys. When I make things they’re never as good as they were in my head, if they work at all. It’s just about practice, and learning, I suppose but I do wish I was better at sewing... I keep trying to learn things but maybe I’m just uncoordinated?

 

Oh, yes! Stressed and frustrated! I’ve been in the hobby about eight years and I’m so tired of having to wait for everything. The waiting is difficult, but the most frustrating part is if the item doesn’t fit (even after careful research), is poor quality, or for whatever reason, doesn’t fit the character. I have so much stuff I don’t want, I’m stressed over how to get rid of it knowing how much money I’ve lost. This bothers me the most!

 

The community aspect used to, until I quit caring and started doing things exclusively for myself. What ended up happening was I stopped taking/posting pictures (which sucks, I barely have the gusto to do anything with fancy photography anymore), latest releases were no longer stressful (no more *gottabuyitnow*, I'l buy it when I feel like it), and the feelings on inadequacy stopped. Since waiting is a big part of the hobby, I don't feel like a goober if someone asks me or a thread title is "What are you waiting on?" and my answer is "Nothing" or "this one piddly item from China that I ordered 3 months ago."

If we're talking purchase-specific, again, I stopped being stressed out once I got and learned how to use my credit cards. If Paypal can't/won't help, the seller is being a butthead, and stuff generally goes tits-up, I can submit a dispute with my CC company. They don't need to know intricate details of the hobby to understand "This is fake/low quality/not as described/never arrived."

The only thing I'm passively uncertain about right now is I finally took the plunge and ordered something from Taobao ... and China customs opened it. However, I paid with a CC, and I'm pretty certain the shopping service is used to customs opening their packages, so if anything arrives damaged or missing or something, I can ask them about it.

 

I've been in the hobby almost ten years too, and yes, it definitely stresses me out sometimes.

From a company, the longest I've waited for something has been 6 months, but from commissioned items or Etsy preorders...Oh that stresses me out so much!! I had an Etsy seller scam me out of my money a couple of years ago, and by the time I found out they scammed other people too, it was too late to get my money back. Now, if things take more than a couple of months, I start stressing and worrying that I might get scammed again. Even good feedback doesn't soothe me, since the one who scammed me had good reviews and communication until I was out of my claim period. I just stress and worry until it arrives.

I also really stress over shipping. USPS has lost a package of mine recently, and several others were delayed significantly, so I stress when something doesn't get here by the estimated date, especially if it's not tracking right. I always pay for tracking and insurance on expensive things, but I buy a lot of things that aren't really worth paying for insurance on, but add up quickly if they all go missing.

But I think the thing that probably stresses me most is slow communication from buyers and sellers. I know not everybody can check their messages every day, but it can really stress me out when I'm waiting days between replies and wondering if this person is going to buy my doll or sell me theirs. It becomes even more stressful when they've said they do want my doll, but then disappear when trying to make payment or trade plans. Then I start wondering if they really will finish the transaction or not. Add in another potential buyer asking about it, then I get extremely stressed because I have to delay that person. I don't want to break my deal with Person A and been seen as a flaky or greedy seller, but I also don't want to ignore Person B or tell them the doll is sold, only to have to relist it if Person A never follows through. I usually avoid this situation by stating that I don't hold items longer than 24 hours after committing to buy, but if they did commit, but don't pay me or are promising photos of things to trade but take days to do it, I feel stuck.

 

I hadn't had any real huge stressful or frustrating situations besides worrying if a package got lost and ended up arriving delayed or just general stress of waiting. Until a couple days ago when I discovered the poor boy in my icon image that I love to bits on here, my Dollmore Nayuta snake kiss had some hidden heavy damage I had foolishly not known about and had found when I was going to restring him 2 days ago. I will just state before I continue this stressful tale that yes I realized I had made many mistakes during this and have learned huge lessons by it now, like not undressing and checking a second hand doll over instantly after receiving it. So like I said, was going to restring him, he had been really loose since I got him and I had gotten the forceps tool to hold the string for Christmas. I had a weekend off of work so I had some free time to finally work on him. I removed his leggings to find not only a HUGE chip that at one point someone tried to fix not so well, but in the other leg there was a huge crack. To make a long story short, I contacted the seller, because their description read 'no chips or cracks', to receive a rude reply with honestly, some unprofessional personal jabs that weren't needed. (eg. "I hope your free time isn't due to time off" I assume what they meant by that is laid off work/unemployed/fired? still baffles me and I have not a clue why they felt the need it to be said on a transaction message to a customer bringing up a horrifying discovery.) Now part of it yes, is my fault for not asking for non clothe images of the doll to see the joints as well as clicking the 'cc or debit' option instead of going through PayPal also as well as like I said, not checking him straight after receiving him and only 2 days ago noticed the damage, not back in Nov. 10. So I chalked it up as a 'lesson learned and lets move on and fix the poor guy' type of deal. Didn't want to gain any negative feelings towards the doll at all. I still was going to put a negative feedback on a doll Facebook group I'm apart of because the rude jabs and the 'you probably did it' type of remark were very uncalled for. For anyone curious, the damage:

 

@RoxiaRose - that does look pretty bad - I hope you can fix the damage.

I find the most stressful part of the hobby is waiting for packages. I have only had one (non-doll-related) international package get lost over the years, but I still stress out. (If another one gets lost it will of course be the one with the super-expensive doll, right? Murphy's law of packages and all that...)

And then there's customs. One time I had a huge customs charge on a gift where the sender had market it 'gift' but had put on a high value because of insurance (not realising that a high value meant that I had to pay over $50 to receive her gift - since it was meant to be a surprise, she hadn't contacted me, or I could have told her...)
And then there's the time that customs made a decimal error somehow and I had the choice to either pay $180 to get my $100 doll or have it sent back to the US. (I chose to pay and then claim, and did get my money back, but it took months. And it was pretty stressful waiting...

I don't really stress out too much over whether or not my dolls are finished. My "cross stitch title" on an old forum used to be 'Mother Superior of Works in Progres' - and I'm pretty much the same with my dolls. They are all 'works in progress' - all 50-something of them.

 

Waiting time is the most stressful... my first doll got stuck in customs for more than half a year because I didn't receive any notice from them. For over 6 months I've anxiously waited and it felt like I was never going to see the doll I've saved up for. I walked into their office with only the hope that maybe my package would be there.
It's a miracle I still got him.
Now, whenever I order things online, I always get the same anxious feeling that it may happen again.

 

I would agree with the stress and worry of waiting. These are a Lot of money. The one thing I found that helps in a lot of situations is that worrying isn't going to make it do what you want or help anything. Say you are driving in a car with someone who is just terrible at driving. Tensing and freaking out the whole time isn't going to stop an accident, It will just make you sore and give you a headache. Enjoy the view. Same goes for waiting for anything in the mail. Yes a point comes where you may need to check on it but freaking out won't make it get to you any faster.

 

Not with BJD but when I first started collecting dolls it was hard because there not a lot of information on the dolls I was collecting so it was hard to tell the quality unless you had one first hand but nowadays it it is a lot better in the doll community in reviews/sharing information.

 

Yea, I'm hoping I'll be able to work some apoxie magic on them to resculpt the chip in the one leg, and make the crack in the other more structurally sound.
Goodness the wait is the killer right now, I had a package delayed in the snow storms happening in the east coast right now x-x and as well as there's another doll being made atm, It's my first time ordering directly from a company and man, I can see what people are talking about with the waiting there x-x. Thankfully it isn't months and months like some say with different companies they bought from, Resinsoul seems pretty quick ^^. I think the longest i've waited for an item I think it was a cosplay outfit (human not doll related xD) was 3ish weeks? So a month for me is brutal x_x but I guess its a good start to build up the waiting patience for when I eventually get to maybe the other companies iv'e heard take much longer like Luts or IOS ^^ That though is another thing I'm very worried about though. The only other purchases I have paid for myself that have been out of country purchases have been buying a mohair doll wig from canada and having it shipped here to the USA, another purchase was an SD sized doll head from Spain. I have not a clue how customs work and when I could get charged custom duty fees and the like. Do you get pinged fees if it's heavier? A bigger box? I haven't heard many people charged with import fees/custom duty fees etc. unless they don't mention them ;w; I'm so worried that when the Resinsoul Yi gets here, I'll get hit with a surprise custom's fee I wont have enough for and he'll either sit there or get sent back ;-; I wouldn't be able to drive all the way to a custom's office and pick him up.

 

I'm relatively new to the hobby (got my first doll in June or July I think...) but it can be stressful, even though I haven't been in it for too long. It's not too stressful that I don't enjoy it/the stress outshadows anything else, but it's there nonetheless.

I've only bought secondhand so far, so I can't say anything about wait times, but international shipping does make me pretty nervous; I bought something from Spain awhile back and it sat in customs - with no updates - for about three weeks I wasn't entirely sure if it had even entered my country or not. So, that's what makes me the most nervous, I think, from what I've experienced so far.

I hate the constant urge to check what's for sale, though. I don't have a lot of money to go around (tl;dr I am a college student and the majority of doll money I have was from selling some action figures that had dramatically shot up in value over a few years), so I really have to try to stretch it to make it work; being able to buy secondhand has helped satisfy that a lot - I've gotten some pretty good deals here and there, and I've also been able to avoid some company wait times through it... But I always have a constant urge to check what's for sale -- on the marketplace, on instagram, facebook groups, etc. to see if something I am looking for (which sadly a good bit of them are limited...) -- which... can be kind of stressful in its own right.

 

I get so anxious whit the time it takes for packages to arrive here, it takes 2 to 4 months!,
I got a lovely and really expensive outfit in june but there isn't EMS shipping from China to here, so i took the risk, and that same package got lost until december, i was so happy to find it arrived the country, of course it will take a month more for me to finally get it u.u.
Also the time during layways and when you wait for faceup stress me a lot.

 

I should probably start by saying not much stresses me out. I mean things have to be really bad for my stress level to get above "meh, it'll be fine," and it's almost always my job when everyone in my dept is out but me (that's always when things go wrong. Ugh.).

So no, this hobby does not stress me out (other than one time.). This is my tenth year as a BJD collector (OMG!!) and at this point I've ordered from the same companies and dealers so many times that I am not worried at all when they ship my dolls. Some of them (Dollmore) I don't even track anymore, because I'm sure they'll get here just fine. Waits don't stress me out because after a 14-month Dollshe wait, everything is short, so a 6-month wait for Dollzone is still a breeze. I get excited (I have a head coming in now and I can't wait!!) and sometimes a little impatient, but that's not stressful.

I have had two points where my collection wasn't doing it for me and I was unhappy with it (once in 2010 and once right now) and I sold a bunch of dolls or I pulled them out to be sold and I was happy again.

The only moment I had that i could say was truly stressful was a bad transaction where a trade when wrong. That was for sure the only month of real stress in this hobby (and it turned out ok in the end), and for a little while I was afraid of second-hand transactions, especially trades. But that lasted like, two days. And I have not had a bad experience since then (I have had one or two that I was afraid would go bad, but that was needless worrying, a left-over from the one bad trade).

I feel like BJDs, as a hobby, should not be stressful....hobbies are meant to be relaxing and enjoyable and a break from real life. If it was constantly stressing me out I'm not sure I'd want to do it anymore...But again, this is coming from someone who just doesn't get truly stressed all that much, so using me as an example is probably a bad idea XD

 

Admittedly, I have been stressed out by the hobby on some occasions. Whenever there's been an unusual delay with shipping (like when my Granado Nuevo body took near a month to finally arrive. I thought for the longest time that it got lost in China's customs), or something I order takes extra time to get made and shipped, it can frustrate me to a degree (it differs, sometimes it's stronger in some cases versus others).

Wait times, however, don't bug me too much, since I expected it going into each order. For the most part I've actually been pretty fortunate with my orders, often having them finished and received ahead of the projected processing time (I expected to join the one year club when I ordered Dollshe King Corey, and was surprised when I received him 6-7 months after finishing off my layaway).

Sometimes doing faceups can stress me out. Especially if I'm doing the perfect faceup---and one wrong mistake is made that completely ruins it.

As for the online community as a whole, I can sometimes get stressed out by it. I sometimes feel awkward getting involved in certain parts of it (like keeping up conversations and following people on IG), but also get stressed out trying to keep up with it all---liking other people's dolls, making comments on posts, adding tags to my own posts, etc). It was stressing me out just trying to keep up with all of it. I've decided lately to become more relaxed with it, and only get involved when I feel like it. There's so much else going on in my life that I need to concentrate on, and not get too totally absorbed in bjd enthusiasts on Instagram.

So, yeah--there are some things that do stress me out in the hobby at times. When it happens, I try to take a deep breath, look in to another hobby/interest, watch a movie/TV show/youtube video, read, write, do art or cook something up to eat until I can de-stress. I also find time to just enjoy my crew, stress-free.

 

I have a bad habit of over preparing. So most of the time I stress on whether or not I should buy a doll that's in stock or used that I know I can get my hands on or risk it and order something directly from the company themselves. That and whether or not to get stock face up, the purpose of the character, if the character even fits with the sculpt, etc etc etc. But at the end of a rough day and I'm playing with my girls its so worth it

 

I've only been in the hobby a few months and I do find it stressful at times. It's not the dolls themselves but it's finding perfect things for them or finding hybrid bodies or just the fact that it feels like an overwhelming hobby sometimes because it never stops cuz there's always something you need/want for your dolls. I try and take time to not look at doll stuff for a bit to calm it down cuz I have anxiety so everything is heightened by that haha.