1. It has come to the attention of forum staff that Dollshe Craft has ceased communications with dealers and customers, has failed to provide promised refunds for the excessive waits, and now has wait times surpassing 5 years in some cases. Forum staff are also concerned as there are claims being put forth that Dollshe plans to close down their doll making company. Due to the instability of the company, the lack of communication, the lack of promised refunds, and the wait times now surpassing 5 years, we strongly urge members to research the current state of this company very carefully and thoroughly before deciding to place an order. For more information please see the Dollshe waiting room. Do not assume this cannot happen to you or that your order will be different.
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how has covid affected your doll collecting

Sep 13, 2021

    1. I originally wanted to go to the offline exhibitions to see more doll's accessories, but due to the covid, all the exhibitions were postponed
       
    2. At some point during lockdown I splurged way too hard on a bunch of small dolls (azone, obitsu), but since then I haven't bought much because shipping has increased too much, and some of my favourite companies only offer shipping through private companies like DHL and fedex which I HATE dealing with.
      Shipping stuff out is also a hassle I don't wanna deal with right now. Not only are most people probabbly going to be put off by the quotes I give them, people that still buy might give me trouble because the item is taking too long to arrive and/or the tracking is not updating. I've heard too many stories lately and I don't need that extra stress in my life! If I think I'm falling out of love with something I own, it's just staying in storage for the foreseeable future.

      tl;dr It's has practically stopped the rate purchases and sales for me
       
      • x 2
    3. I could copy-paste @sahoma's post here, insanely expensive shipping and extreme shipping times stop me from buying and I've been sitting on a stack of dolls I wanted to put up on the marketplace for 1 1/2 years now, with no end in sight.
      Everywhere I look people have dolls sit in limbo or disappear and paypal chargebacks are the order of the day, it seems. If I have to get something like accessories I can't make, I try to order somewhere shipping seems to be working ok at that time - but I don't do it unless I have to.

      Instead I try to do more with the lovelies I have, doing extra DIY projects for them. I've also started writing a fantasy/ crime story starring a group of my best loved characters. I haven't written a word since my early adulthood days and it's just so much fun, and fun is hard to come by these days.:3nodding:
       
      • x 2
    4. For me, Covid changed my life - into work and care and sleep. I have no time at the moment to do much for myself and so my dolls are sitting on their shelves in my dark bedroom, waiting patiently for me to have time for them again. In the meantime, my last orders came in - even the Dollshe one! I do enjoy looking at them a lot. And I hope to start doing things with them again sometime in the future. I do have ideas for costumes...
       
      • x 2
    5. I'm retired, so I pretty much stay at home anyway, but covid made me depressed because I couldn't get together with my friends or go to church. My dolls keep me sane and calm when I get really depressed.
       
      • x 4
    6. I actually leaned into the hobby hard during the height of the pandemic. I was fortunate enough to keep my job and work from home, and through a combination of factors I actually had a lot more disposable income. I acquired several more dolls than I would've otherwise, and it gave me something to distract myself with. I'm also really grateful to have strengthened several of my doll friendships; we weren't able to meet in person, so it gave me an incentive to be more involved online and through text.

      I will say that it did change where I was purchasing dolls/accessories from. I had a package from China stuck for nearly four months, but everything from Korea arrived within a week or so, and I tried to lean on companies with dealers or a US presence. Nine9Style, Migidoll, and Volks USA got a lot of my money.
       
      • x 3
    7. Covid had an impact on my income. I'm doing ok but had to hang back from buying all the dolls for my peace of mind. I miss a lot of things.
       
    8. When many of the countries I used to buy most of my doll things from closed down international shipping last year, I started shopping more on Taobao for doll items. It had the happy side effect of introducing me to many talented seamstresses and wigmakers I wouldn’t have found otherwise.

      It also made me really ponder my collection, so I ended up selling off a few dolls that weren’t working for me anymore and repaint a few more to make them more to my liking.
       
      • x 1
    9. It's mostly been a positive thing for me in terms of the hobby.☆
      I work from home and often have lulls where I can shop, take pictures of my dolls, or just have them sit on my desk while I work.
      My husband also got a new job with better pay, so I have been able to more easily afford things for my dolls without the strain of needing to pay other things.

      Ultimately, it's given me more time to really focus in on the more intricate aspects of the hobby (faceups/style).

      The only thing that has suffered is the shipping prices. I have had many instances where shipping to the US has been substantially higher and people have backed out simply because it's insane.
       
      • x 2
    10. I have always loved my doll hobby, but have difinately leaned into it hard the last two years. . . Not related to covid specifically, other stuff going on. The part that is related to Covid is working from home and being surrounded by my dolls all day, it is really nice, has me thinking about them and playing with them more. I also got a new job which meant more money to spend on the hobby. . . I bought a LOT of dolls this year. . .
       
      • x 2
    11. Covid definitely affected my income in a positive way. A lot of people stopped working so that gave me an advantage. More hours, more money and bonuses. I was able to save quite a bit and I did kind of overdo it on buying dolls for sure. This is the first time in my life I have bought dolls and not gone into debt to get them and it feels amazing!
       
    12. Got back into the hobby after many, many years out of it. Not sure it had much to do with covid since I got back into dolls because of a game I’m playing, but once I started buying stuff I think whatever stress I had from covid manifested itself in my splurging. Several times I asked myself what was going on internally to make me go all out like this (which is out of character for me).
       
    13. I got introduced to the hobby, and got time to learn a lot about it. I was able to get my first doll. Although I don't have as much time as I had hoped to spend with her, I am very happy I was finally able to get my first doll as it brought me lots of comfort during these stressful times.
       
      • x 1
    14. It got me back into the hobby!
      When COVID had me working from home, I started working in my very sad, previously unused studio. No pictures on the walls, hardly any decor, and my three dolls hidden away in the back of a shelf, largely forgotten.

      Well, I decided to pretty things up to make it more tolerable to work in there, and I finally brought out the dolls alongside a bunch of decor. With all my newfound free time (time that would otherwise be spent commuting), I ended up buying a few more dolls over the course of the pandemic, and my husband even got me a cute glass display case with LEDs for me to display them right next to my workstation. So now I can admire my dolls all day as I work. :)
       
      • x 2
    15. The only real impact for me is that with so many events, cultural spaces, restaurants, etc. closed for safety, I spent more money on dolls and doll items because I couldn't occupy myself with the other things I'd been doing. I'm not sure that's necessarily a good thing, haha!
       
    16. I guess indirectly, covid got me into a new job which earns a bit more money so I could justify impulse buying an Atelier Momoni Somni.... and actually indulging myself to order a Frappzilla Lupi...

      And I had enough time to actually customize my Dollshe girl when she finally came after a two-year wait. So. That's something?

      Not much impact overall, though. I haven't had the mental energy to do much more than play with my play dolls.
       
    17. I've been extremely isolated and in a lot of fear, being already severely chronically ill, so dolls gave me something creative to spend time on while alone, or a distraction from grief and other things. I spent a lot of time the last year or so in sewing, while listening to audiobooks or similar. Crafting meant I had a reason to get out of bed and something to do and progress I could see.
       
    18. I haven't found myself with any extra time. Being a freelancer, I already worked from home, and my volunteer "side-gig" is with a regional food bank network. (That is to say, an "essential" service. We've kept right on doing what we do throughout the entire mess-) Given that, my dolls haven't seen any more attention than usual.

      Avoiding potentially germy people as much as I can has made in-person shopping a rare thing, so I've been web-ordering fabric and such a little more often than I did in the Before Times... but not to a huge extent. Delivery delays have been a constant issue, and I'm a lot more wary of shipping charges than I used to be. (Shipping has gone from "silly" to "absolutely ludicrous" over the last two years-) That's curtailed a lot of the smaller, more casual potential purchases I might have made, especially from outside the US.

      The lack of casual shopping has had one nice effect, though... My fun-money account has gotten pretty flush. Not quite to a "Yeah, let's go ahead and buy that Volks Andre!"-level of fatness... YET, at least... But it's healthy enough to make this Christmas a whole lot of fun for my nieces and nephews. :cool:
       
    19. I wasn't collecting dolls when covid hit, I started buying after things got back to normal, I think before there were issues with shipping companies like Japan couldn't ship anything to USA etc but when I started buying Japan started shipping normally again or with DHL so I could say that covid didn't affect me at all with my dolls... even in my regular life, I still had my two jobs and I don't go out that much so things were always pretty much the same in my life.
       
    20. Didn't think about it til recently but I haven't even looked at buying anything for them at all lately, even second hand. Shipping has become a nightmare to the AU and for a while we were under a curfew so going out and taking photos of dolls wasn't even possible qwq