What was the biggest mistake you ever made in the hobby?

My biggest mistakes I've made have been in buying dolls that I didn't love at first sight. I liked them, and got them at a good price but wasn't absolutely taken with them. That tends to lead to them living in their box and sometimes not even getting a wig or clothes. Little more selective as of late.

 

Well, about 3 hours ago, I paid $575 out of my checking account instead of putting it in my credit card.

 

Probably buying a doll from ebay as my first was the biggest mistake. Thankfully it was not a recast, however the face-up wasn't what I paid for and it was actually a different sculpt. That was an SD and honestly I believe that's the reason I don't like SDs.... I sold her (and a blank littefee after her) and didn't have dolls for years until Liria from Fairyland was released. Another big regret was not getting her from FL or DDE with every possible option. I now have a lovely secondhand fullset Liria but she is lacking her sleeping head.... I feel so INCOMPLETE....

 

I think I would associate my biggest mistake with a bad (the first and so far, only) experience commissioning an outfit. I've always been careful to check feedback and look at sales posts with a critical eye, so I've never had a bad experience in that respect.

However, I didn't do my due diligence when I commissioned a seamstress for an outfit, and had a drawn out and somewhat frustrating experience. While her feedback had only positive reviews, it turned out that there were a few past problem transaction threads that described very similar experiences to what I experienced. Interestingly, someone else also contacted me about having similar problems during my transaction.

So, here's a word of advice, people with bad experiences don't always bother leaving feedback in someone's feedback thread (maybe they feel awkward doing it), so be sure to look in the problem transactions forum also when you're doing your research.

 

Buying an MSD when all my other dolls are SD size. I thought she would look like a child/young teen, but she just looked like an adult in a different scale. Fortunately I was able to sell her to someone for almost as much as I paid.

 

Using a cell phone and/or cheap camera and thinking that the photos were pretty good when I first started taking pictures of them. Photographing my dolls has always been one of my favorite things about owning them, and getting a nice camera was the best decision ever.

Another one for me was buying a tiny anthro. It wasn't a huge mistake because I learned that I didn't like the size, but I kind of knew in my gut that it wasn't right for me but I bought it anyways.

 

Wig stains...

 

Back when the Delfs were being discontinued at LUTS I got it into my head to sell my beloved Miyu and reshell her as a more "mature" sculpt I was totally sure I would love even more... so I sold her before her new shell arrived. It was a super depressing transaction because she broke in transit (what I thought was a secure packing job was not in the face of that Type 2 neck piece jiggling around in transit). Then her new owner couldn't wait for the replacement torso piece I immediately bought for her from LUTS, so I had to take one of my wife's dolls apart for her and send her a piece of it to make things ok on that end. One of our dolls was in pieces for a couple of months while we waited for LUTS to send the torso piece, and of course after several months of waiting for the new shell for my character it was utterly, totally wrong. I've finally gotten her back to a doll I love as much as I did that doll, but only after several years of trial and error and she is now the ELEVENTH iteration of the character. I pack things like I expect them to be sat on by elephants now and I try not to jump the gun when reshelling, because looking back I know I could've saved myself a lot of heartache if I'd just been more patient and hung onto the Miyu a little longer.

 

Hah yes, this. Who knew gray would stain?

 

Impulse buying I will buy a doll or doll head and then not bond with it and come to dislike it, but be worried about regretting selling it after it sells :/

 

Well I bought a doll head from the marketplace in the mold I wanted and I bought the same sculpt full doll brand new directly from Soom because I wanted twins... I bought a cheaper AOD body for my floating head and then found out my boy was now taller than his twin D: also the cheaper body was nicer looking and more buff. So I sold the doll body from Soom and suddenly realized that I LIKED that the twins were not the same height and that one of them was buffer and athletic and maybe the shorter twin was sickly so I bought ANOTHER body directly from Soom lol

it wasn't a terrible mistake but it did cost me more money than I would have originally spent if I thought of that beforehand!

 

I started the hobby with vinyl dolls instead of resin, but they are still the large 60cm bodies. Due to the overwhelming amount of information available on the internet, it is not always easy to find the correct info you need. So the mistake I made was I ended up with a bunch of outfits and body parts that didn't really fit. It was a very sad sight to see a nice doll dress that I really liked not fit the dolls I have.

 

At first I was really bad with impulse buying with clothes and dolls.
Now my current mistake is I didn't buy the whole Venitu doll when I had the chance. I'm gonna have his head but his body was discontinued.

 

For me my biggest mistake so far was also impulse buying. I was very new to the hobby (still ) and I was caught up in the excitement of getting the dolls quickly so I could have a group to work with. I wish I had taken my time and saved for my grail doll instead of just jumping right in.

 

I consider it a mistake because it is one of the things that I always tell new owners not to do now, but I'm happy with how it worked out for me so I don't really regret it...
I settled for my first doll.
because I was intimidated by the idea of receiving my first doll blank and what not, and because I wanted to feel like I was getting more for my money, I ended up buying a fullset mini from dollzone that came with a whole bunch of stuff that I had literally no use for instead of the basic minifee that I actually wanted for the character I had in mind.
so eventually I decided I just couldn't deal anymore, the dollzone aimi was not my character.
I still love my first doll, and she has since developed a character of her own, but she was just not what I really wanted.
if you have a doll in mind that you feel is the one then just get it. it may take longer to save for, it may not come with all the bells and whistles, but in the end it's worth it to have what you really wanted rather than something that kind of sort of works.

 

I have made a couple of mistakes since I started in this hobby.
The first and greatest is related to buying my first doll. I researched for about a year but my budget was very limiting. I couldn't find the doll I loved for sale so I settled for another doll that I could afford but it just wasn't what I wanted. Fortunately the head of the doll I loved appeared in the marketplace several months later and I was able to purchase it ^w^
Another mistake I made was trying to force a character into a doll that was trying to express itself. I had a very hard time with that, trying to make it work, changing things, I even had a couple of anxiety attacks. But in the end I finally realized that the doll wasn't the problem, I was the problem. And I learnt that sometimes the dolls can speak for themselves and they can tell us who they are or want to be.

 

My first mistake was buying a head from the marketplace instead of a full doll for my first doll. I didn't know what to do with this thing. I gave him to a friend for Christmas that year because I felt bad wiping the pretty faceup to learn to do them myself and she loved him just the way he was.

The biggest mistake/s took me a while to learn. I love fantasy dolls, and I fall prey to the "OMG it's limited = must have it" rather easily, so SOOM got me for the longest time. I would fall in love with their promo pictures, but once the doll was home, I was unhappy with one thing or another. A lot of it was I needed to realize what kind of collector I am. Dolls that are "just pretty" don't do it for me; my dolls need to have characters/back stories attached. I ended up selling over 9 full dolls and several heads because I loved how pretty they were but could never fall in love with them. A few I even sold immediately upon arrival. I do my research on a doll now, and make sure I'm not just buying because of the "ooh shiny" factor.

 

The mistake I regret the most is not starting sooner. I was looking at BJDs for about 4-5 years before joining DoA or purchasing my first doll and because of that there are a lot of sculpts I would love to have but they are very difficult or almost impossible to find now.

The second mistake came with my first doll, I purchased her on the MP from a company I was less familiar with. Within the year I had wiped her faceup and sold her body, not realizing she was an LE40 I tried selling her at one point out of frustration of not finding any resin matches for her new body and due to the changes I made no one was interested. The head sat in a box for years until May when I put her on a new KDF body just to see her on a body again and discovered that 5 year old Dollmore resin matches perfectly with new Luts resin. Fortunately this made me fall back in love with her sculpt again and I have re-imagined her character and am working to get another KDF body for her.
While this has thankfully worked out, it has made me much more careful about my doll purchases and I do all the research I can on a sculpt before purchase.

 

My first doll was an Iplehouse JID Asa. Being my first doll, I wasn't terribly knowledgeable about doll clothing sizes. This was before I had a DoA account, so I didn't have access to things like the 'what fits' threads. So, I bought her from Iplehouse naked and went on Etsy and ordered a bunch of clothes- which I thought were the right size (I mean, they said MSD, afterall!). You can see where this is going, right? She shows up and half the stuff I got from her is waaaay too small. Poor dear spends the first few weeks of her 'life' in a box because she's naked from the waist down. Whoops.

 

My biggest mistake in this hobby is impatience. As in when it comes to limited dolls or, my Kryptonite, Volks dolls, I tend to buy first think later. While I've got a lot of lovely dolls and I adore them all, I know I wouldn't have bought at least one or two of them if I'd been more patient in waiting for the exact right one to come along. Lesson learned - don't settle; that perfect doll will come along when s/he is good and ready for you to find them.