RedBubble Poor Product Quality

I recently bought some stickers through RedBubble. Or, at least, I tried to.

I purchased the stickers on March 15th. A few weeks later I realized they weren't coming. I contacted them on April 11th, telling them my stickers hadn't arrived. They slowly responded to my emails over the next few weeks, had me contact the local post office along with the apartment office. Finally, on May 1st, they “shipped them again”. On May 7th, they arrived.

I couldn't believe how low the quality of these stickers are.

• While they are cutout to be shaped, the process is obviously automated by computer, and the cutout technique is awkward at best.
• The quality of the stickers are very low. They are pixelated, and printed from a crappy laser jet printer.
• One of the stickers contains white text. These stickers were printed on, believe it or not, a white background. That's right, I've gotten some white on white stickers.
• Not sure why, but the Reddit alien has some weird chunk hanging below him, which needs to be chopped off.

Four of the six stickers are at least usable, despite their low quality. The responses to my emails, while they were really polite and courteous, appeared to be canned responses. After further review of the website, it looks like people upload graphics and they automate the rest. However, I feel I should have been warned ahead of time that my product was at risk of being of poor quality and that RedBubble cannot vouch for the quality of the uploaded sticker image (not that this excuses the laser jet ink).

If you'd like to checkout some high quality stickers take a look at Sticker Mule. The quality of products they make is great, you're typically going to get non-residue vinyl stickers printed using high quality printers.

Thomas has contributed to dozens of enterprise Node.js services and has worked for a company dedicated to securing Node.js. He has spoken at several conferences on Node.js and JavaScript and is an O'Reilly published author.