Y'all when I started researching for this
video I honestly thought it was going to
be faster
huh
I thought I knew everything I genuinely
did I was a backer for the Lisa Frank
Glamour Dolls campaign back in 2017
I really thought I knew the story
I saw other peoples videos on it
and I was in it, I did
all of the things, I was part of it.
My friend, oh-my gosh, I did not know.
There was so much that I did not know
It is so fucked up, like I am just-
I am absolutely blown away.
Because the thing is, the more I started
looking into it, the more things that I found
And the more connections I was making
And I was like oh my gosh.
This is a story, my friend.
There is so much that happened
in the Lisa Frank Glamour Dolls Collab
That we did not know, because everything
wasn't laid out through hindsight
we know hindsight is 20/20.
Now we're seeing 20/20 my friend.
And the rainbows are not rainbowing,
and the unicorns and the peguseseses, and
they're not, it's not good, it's very bad.
So if you are ready, to go on this
wild journey with me
This is Behind the Controversy.
And its starting right now.
[Music]
I would dare to say, pretty much
everybody watching this video
has been online and seen something
that you never intended to purchase,
but you had that impulse feeling.
You had that feeling because,
for some reason, you didn't know
that you needed this,
and you needed to buy it.
Maybe it solves some kind of problem
in your life, maybe it was some kind of
advancement on something you already knew
or maybe it was due to nostalgia.
Something that reminded you of your childhood
or just when you were younger,
something that made you feel happy,
during that time.
And maybe its even something that made
an entire generation feel happy.
That's the feeling that the backers had
when we saw that Lisa Frank was
coming out with makeup with a company
named Glamour Dolls.
Now we did not, a lot of us had never
heard of Glamour Dolls.
Imma be 100%, I'd never heard of
Glamour Dolls before.
But I had heard of Lisa Frank.
And I was freaking out because
I was a sticker collector.
I-I will tell you though,
the scratch-and-sniff stickers
were my favorite, but Lisa Frank
stickers were super cool too.
They were very very popular,
and that's the way it was
for a lot of people that were GenX
or older millennials.
Mostly, probably mid-millennials as well.
If it wasn't the stickers,
maybe it was the school supplies.
Because Trapper Keepers were a thing.
It was not just a regular notebook.
It was a cool notebook.
And they were kind of pricey,
so if you had a Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper,
you were cool.
Or if you were like me, you had a knock-off
version from K-mart, which made you
moderately cool. Not really.
But we pretended we were.
"I'll never forget the day
I got stuck on Lisa Frank.
The stickers were so cool, the colors
were awesome.
I gotta find more. So go to the store,
And WOW, there's tons of awesome
Lisa Frank stuff. I gotta have it!
What more can I say?
Pretty soon my friends, Ashley and Lindsay
are going Lisa Frank Crazy too."
And like I mentioned earlier, the company
that started all of this wasn't super
well known. They're called Glamour Dolls,
so they had to get their name out there
somehow, so they used an uber popular
youtuber, at the time,
named Candy Johnson.
And Candy Johnson was the perfect influencer
for this campaign.
I don't even know if we were calling
people influencers at that point.
But anyway, my point is that Candy Johnson
was top of her game. Everybody freaking
loved Candy, she was like the sweetest,
sweetest, kindest person.
And she has this really light voice.
And everybody freakin' loved Candy.
"Hi guys, 2016 is behind us, but
I am gonna share with you
my Best in Beauty of 2016.
Make sure if you have not subscribed,
subscribe, join the family,
become a Candy Corn. Candy Corn,
like a Unicorn, but like candy corn,
I don't know, I'll have to think
about that one.
And follow me on Snapchat, Twitter,
Instagram, Facebook for all kinds of
different and awesome things."
So when Candy announced the collaboration
between Glamour Dolls and Lisa Frank,
people lost their minds, they opened
their wallets to the tune of over $300,000
Almost 6,000 people backed this project.
Now, if you don't know what
I'm talking about as far as Kickstarter
and "backing" a project,
basically, it's kind of like a GoFundMe-ish
kind of thing, but for a business.
So the business wants to make a product,
but they don't have the money,
so they go and they tell people
"Hey, we wanna make this product,
if you back us, if you give us money
at different tiers, you'll get X products
for helping us to create the product."
This story has been told many times before.
But I don't think it has been told
in this way, because what I'm gonna
focus on in this video is the point of view
of the backers. What was it like to be
a backer from the beginning, and what
kind of tactics did Glamour Dolls use
to keep us hanging on for well over a year.
Where many, many people, including me,
did not ask for refunds even after
they were over a year late in sending out
products.
Some of you are probably sitting there
thinking, like, "why didn't you know?"
like, "why didn't you see the red flags?"
Like, "what happened?"
I'm going to tell you.
I'm going to share with you what they
did to us.
I'm pointing down because of a 22 page
script here with all the fucked-up shit
that they did.
Because, if you haven't figured it out yet
Yea, we didn't get anything.
[wheeze] Well some people got a little bit,
but I didn't get anything
And the vast majority of people got
absolutely nothing, the people that did
get things, got very very little.
It's layered. It's multi-layered.
So lets just jump in to the very beginning
which was the start of the Kickstarter
in February of 2017.
[Music]
Something you might want to remember
about 2017 was that we didn't have
the inundation of weird collabs,
like we do now, I mean,
the Glamlite Pizza palette was still about
a year away, and that one broke
the internet.
It was like the first really weird collab
that people were like "that's odd, but
also kind of cool".
The kind of collabs we were getting
at the time were things like
Wonder Woman and Luxie
and PUR and the Trolls Movie.
A makeup collaboration with Lisa Frank
had literally never been done before,
so people, naturally, were very excited
due to that strong feeling of nostalgia.
The Kickstarter launches with a maximum
bid of 40 dollars to get a few products
and a goal of 30,000 dollars.
And the lowest buy-in to get something was
pretty cheap, at 5 dollars for what they
called, a digital background.
It was an image that you could use as your
background on your phone,
or on your computer, or whatever.
The kickstarter ran for 45 days
from February 16, 2017, to April 2, 2017.
It's also important to talk about the fact
that Glamour Dolls said that backers
would have a say in the products
being created.
That there would be polling and voting
and people would get sneak peaks,
people would also get the products
at a discount, because the products
would eventually end up at retailers
but the backers, because you bought
in a bundle, would get things cheaper
than you would get if you bought
the products individually.
Just 3 days into the campaign,
Glamour Dolls posted their update.
They were so so excited.
They said that Lisa was "opening
her vault and would be sending
1000 vintage goodies to be included,
for the first 1000 backers".
They promised a second treat,
if they hit 2000 backers, and Lisa
had something really special planned
if they made it to 10,000.
They're just hyping the heck out of the
backers, because they also promised
something called "stretch rewards".
And they way they described it is not
how it turned out.
Basically, what they said is that
if the backers, as a community, complete
a set of challenges, that something will
be unlocked, and this something was going
to be very very exciting.
Challenges included tasks like creating
a Lisa Frank-inspired makeup look
and taking a picture of it, writing a rap
about Glitter and tweeting it, and they
even had a challenge where a person
had to create a foil unicorn horn and put
it on their head and take a picture
of themselves in public, wearing
the unicorn horn.
40 people had to take a picture of their
vintage Lisa Frank products and submit
those pictures.
See, the community's participating,
they're excited, they're talking about all
the things that they're doing because
in every comment section under each post
there's a place for people of the
community to communicate, to talk about
what's happening. Its almost like a
little, not a message board, but just
kind of a place to dump things that people
were thinking after the update.
So people are hyped about this, they're
so excited about their stretch reward.
And this is the first big disappointment
for the backers.
Because it was not an extra item added to
the bag, it wasn't even a reward, because
when you think of a reward, you think
that you're getting something.
What it actually was, was a mock-up photo
of an image of three-piece nail polish set
and this is the kicker about it,
no pun intended, that the nail polish set
wasn't included in any of the levels,
so nobody that had put in any money
at this point was going to get the
nail polishes that were featured
in the picture, in order to get the
nail polishes, you had to now increase
your bid by at least 15 dollars
because Glamour Dolls had just created
new tiers that required more investment
and the backers were like "what?"
"That's it?"
What we just worked so hard for, we just
did all the challenges, 40 of us sent
pictures of our Lisa Frank stuff that we
dug out of our basement or out of
our attics, and we found the stuff and
we took the picture and we did
all the work, and we got a drawing of
something we're not getting unless we
spend more money?
That's what happened.
I'm gonna put the whole post on the screen
for you to read, but I'll read one of the
key points.
"We started this collection with a handful
of products, but a big part of this
Kickstarter is expanding the collection
with the community and developing new
products to add to it.
What maybe separates this Kickstarter from
others is that we don't know how big the
collection will ultimately be.
It all depends on community engagement".
But the thing was is that they told people
how big it was going to be.
Because that's what they put their money
in for because it said if you put the
money in for this amount, then you'll get
this stuff, and now she's saying that it
may get even bigger than that.
Because what was about to happen is they
were about to add even more tiers with
even more products.
The explanation continued with this,
which was the kicker, "we would have told
you from the beginning" that basically it
was only a drawing of a mock-up of
something that no one was getting yet, but
"we only developed it last week.
In response to fan engagement after we
researched cost formulations. For many
people, the challenges were a fun way to
unlock it and we'll be clear going
forward so you can choose whether
to participate".
Unlock what? They unlocked a picture of
something they had to pay more for.
Thing is is that kind of the way that
these stretch rewards work, but they
didn't explain it to people that way.
When people see a stretch reward, they're
going to think that they're getting
something as a reward.
What it is traditionally called is
a "stretch goal" and that is not something
that is officially part of kickstarter,
but something that Kickstarter campaigns
do often. They usually call them goals,
not rewards, and from what I was reading,
a lot of the stretch goals typically happen
after the backers already have their first
set of products because they have gotten
their products, they're excited about it,
they're loving it, and now they want
something more.
So in order to stretch their amount that
they've collected and create more products
they have a stretch goal. So let's say, If
I get 100 people to donate 20 more dollars
we can create X products, so lets see if
we can get to our stretch goal, rather
than, it's a mystery, it's a game, it's a
reward, it wasn't.
They just completely missed represented
that to backers. But I'm telling you,
that snafu is mild, compared to what is
coming next, like that-that's just
extremely minor. It gets so so much worse.
So trying to backtrack, Glamour Dolls
tells their backers "hey, if we get to
3,500 backers, then we're going to include
in everybody's bag, the first 3500 people,
a Lisa Frank designed crease brush.
Sometimes they call this a crease brush,
sometimes they call it a blending brush,
its the same brush.
The promise of the free crease brush,
I am not kidding you, according to the
Kickstarter brought them past that
3500 backer mark in 24 hours.
So at this point in time, highest level
includes everything that they've said
so far, plus the nail polishes at a $60
price point. But people were still mad,
people were like, this is not what you
said it was going to be, sir, ma'am, sir.
So in response, Glamour Dolls was like
"ok, well, we will add something else,
we'll add something from our own line",
It was what they called their
"Gypsy Eyeliners" to the first
2000 backers who complete a survey
to pick their preferred color of this
liner. They were going to add that into
the boxes, and that I think kind of
calmed people down a little bit,
they were like "ok, that feels more like
a reward." And people started getting
really excited about everything all over
again. A backer named Marsha said
"Wow, thanks yet again, the entire vibe
of this campaign totally reminds me of
what it felt like to open my noisy
Lisa Frank Trapperkeeper, write with
my pencils, play with my erasers, that I
never used, to keep pristine, like dolls
LOL, etc. in school. It made me smile
and dream. I feel like we're all reliving
our childhoods through this campaign and
your team is making this fun. I'm hoping
this will begin a new generation
of Lisa Frank fans, when kids see us using
our stuff".
Little did Marsha and the rest of us know,
we'd never use the stuff, we're not
getting the stuff. In March of 2017,
the Kickstarter is still going on, and
one of the founders and CEOs
of Glamour Dolls came on to clarify a
couple things. You're gonna see his name
coming up a lot. His name is Peter,
he looks like that. Just so you can get
a visual of who we're talking to.
Peter, CEO, founder, Glamour Dolls,
along with a chick named Jessica,
that's Jessica. Back in 2017, unless you
were in the makeup industry, there wasn't
as much information readily available
about how makeup manufacturing worked,
so Peter felt like it was important
to explain to the backers, kind of, what
we were in for with this. He explained
something called minimum order quantities
and he said "as we get more pledges we
have to order more units and if the order
gets big enough, we are able to consider
adding new products, knowing that we will
be able to meet the factory minimums for
packaging and filling".
And then he says "as we add new products,
there will need to be some higher pledge
tiers, there no way around it. I wish I
could tell you exactly how much the
highest tier will be or how many products
we'll end up with, but we came here to
figure that out with you. But, you may see
the problem with this, in that they
haven't even created or started to create
the products they've already promised,
and now we're talking about adding on
another layer, more tiers, more products,
that also they don't have any plan for how
they're going to make them. There's no
artwork from Lisa frank, there's no colors
picked out, there's just a concept
in their minds, that's all that exists.
And as we go through this, you'll realize
they didn't even calculate the financials
on how much all this was going to cost,
or if they did calculate the financials,
they didn't care, they were like, we'll
figure it out some how.
And then Peter said something that stuck
in the minds of backers for the rest
of the campaign. This is what he said,
"Ultimately, whatever we do and don't
figure out, these products will be
available for individual purchase before
the end of the year". The end of 2017.
Kickstarter backers will just be getting
them first. They didn't.
So you remember how I said they were
adding all of these new products, and
either they didn't calculate the
financials to figure out how much they
were gonna cost or they did know, but they
"oh we'll get the money from somewhere"
they kinda figured out how they might get
the money. They tapped into a creator
named Wengie, now back then, there was
a big boom around creators who did DIY
challenge kinds of videos. I'm gonna show
you some of Wengie's thumbnails. She got
tens of millions of views on these videos
Wengie was huge in this space, especially
with kids. At the time, Wengie only had
6 million official subscribers
on her channel, but she had way more
watching her.
Wengie: Hey guys, it's Wengie Welcome back
but today I'm here to make a special
awesome announcement, I'm so excited
to announce this, like I can't even right
now. I'm going to be collaborating with
Lisa Frank and Glamour Dolls on an
eyeshadow palette, like What?! for those
of you who haven't heard about Lisa Frank
she is so amazing. She is, like, literally my childhood.
And her art is all about rainbows,
unicorns, colorful, like
everything I'm about.
Like, her art is my aesthetic, but
the most amazing thing is
you guys get to be involved as well
because you guys are my Wingy-con fam
and if I'm going to work on my first
huge collaboration, it's got to be with you guys.
So, I really want you guys to help contribute to our creative.
Choose the colors with us, choose the designs of the pallet.
And we've partnered with Glamour Dolls Make-up
to make this come alive.
Because they are a high quality, vegan, cruelty-free brand.
Not only that,
they make super affordable makeup,
because I want this collaboration to be affordable to everyone.
And the great thing about this whole process
is this was Internationally available no matter where you are,
you can pre-order this palette.
I'm not a hundred percent on this timeline, but it seems
like this is when they added more tiers.
They added a seventy dollar tier, a one hundred dollar tier,
and two hundred dollar tier,
but what they added that was the most important thing
that I think really turned everything,
was the additional of the Trapper Keeper palettes.
These were going to be six pan eye-shadow palettes that
looked legit like a trapper keeper.
No one had ever seen anything like this before and the
nostalgia overload. Oh my gosh. People lost their minds when
they were thinking, "Oh my gosh, a trapper keeper
eye-shadow palette, I need to have this in my life!"
So, along with Wengie trapper keeper palette
there would be a naturally glam palette and a bold a bright palette.
All adorned with Lisa Frank artwork.
Just an hour before the kickstarted ended,
Glamour Dolls made another promise.
They said that everybody, thanks to their participation,
anybody that participated in the Kickstarter was going to get a goody bag.
What was in the goody bag? No idea - no one ever got it.
But they promised, they said "There's gonna be a goody bag added,
thank you so much for backing this project.":
According to the community, at the time, it looked like before
Wengie launched her video, they were at about
two hundred fifty thousand dollars in pledges.
After Wendgie launched her video, they reached their peak
at three hundred seventy thousand dollars and almost six thousand people.
That was an average of about sixty two dollars spent per backer.
The one hundred dollar tier got everything from the collection.
And the two hundred dollar tier got two sets of everything in the collection.
Now me not having a ton of money, at the time, and being a procrastinator
I waited until the last minute to back this campaign.
So I joined in at the very last moment in the very last day of the campaign
at the seventy dollar level, so I paid seventy dollars plus five dollar shipping.
And I will tell you, I was most excited about those dang trapper keeper palettes.
So excited about those things!
And I was excited, after I saw the drawing I was excited about the nail polishes.
They looked really cool. I'd never seen anything quite like that.
And I wanted to review it for the channel,
I was excited to talk to you all about it.
Was it good quality along with being really cute?
I wanted to let you know.
[music]
Then something really weird happened.
Because, at the time, I was really in to subscription boxes, I got a ton of them.
I got my Ipsy bag, and I got this in it.
Yes, I still have it.
This is the Lisa Frank blush brush.
What?
Why-why am I getting this in an Ipsy bag?
Let me go ahead and show you,
it is super super freaking cute.
there is a little line here, where the image connects,
but overall it's just a very cute design.
I will show you though that the, ya know, it is a little wiggly,
it's not great quality, but at the time,
I was more just confused. We are all super confused
on what is happening and why the Lisa Frank blush brushes are in Ipsy.
You guys! I'm so excited!
I saw that this might be a possibility, something you could get in your bag,
and I got it! I'm so excited!
The fourth grader in my is, like, jumping up and down, she has
her Lisa Frank trapper keeper like in the air.
This is a Lisa Frank inspired brush!
Look at this thing! Look [laughs] at this thing!
There's magical, like, unicorns on the handle.
And it is pink, and vibrant, and blue, and green,
and all sorts of magical colors.
If I would've had this in fourth grade I would've been the coolest kid around
I would've been like, "yes, I'm putting on my fake blush with my [laughs]
Lisa Frank blush brush. Thank you very much."
Guys, I'm completely serious, I had the trapper keeper, I had the folders,
I had the pencils, I had the little, like pencil holder. I had everything -
everything Lisa Frank.
When I was in fourth grade, that was like, the only way to be cool was to have
multicolored rainbow cheetahs on your trapper keeper.
And now I am twentyfour yearold woman with a rainbow unicorn brush and I love it.
But it does make sense, it will make sense
I'm gonna get there.
About a month after the kickstarter ended, there was a red flag.
Besides the red flag of the blush brush being in Ipsy bags and
them not telling us that this could happen,
this was another major red flag that we probably should've seen.
What they posted to the kickstarter was basically about lessons that they
had learned so far.
This is what they said:
"Lisa knows how much we've got in the works, but her advice was to
stop and focus on a few things with high production quality rather than
trying to do everything at once.
Our friends at Kickstarter gave us some very similar advice-
this is a marathon, not a sprint.
We've taken it to heart, and stopped, gone back to the lab and made sure that the
next few weeks are going to run smoothly and be everything that we promised. "
So ever body, Lisa Frank, Kickstarter, every body's telling Glamour Dolls
you're doing too much. Stop.
You have made too many promises and you are going to just lose everything
slow down, figure out how you're going to
just get a couple of high quality products out and then worry about the rest,
but the thing is; is on the Kickstarter page, it had said 'estimated deliver of
September of 2017,
So we are now the beginning of May. June, July, August, Semptember,
that's four months until the estimated deliver date of the products.
Now, I didn't know at the time a lot about production, I had no idea,
so I didn't know that was freaking impossible.
[scoff[
I don't think a lot of us knew that that was freaking impossible,
but it was freaking impossible.
But Glamour Dolls didn't tell us it was freaking impossible,
oh no, they made us think it was we were getting our stuff in September
because, remember, at this point, they've got thirteen products
that they've promised us,
including counting each nail polish as one product.
And then, on top of that, they had promised us
that they would add in a Lisa Frank designed nail file, so that made it
fourteen products that they needed to give us, in four months.
[eh-eh]
Because we didn't realize as backers,
that Lisa was designing all of this stuff from scratch.
Why in the world, she was not using existing artwork, I have no freaking clue.
I still don't know why she didn't use existing artwork.
And in hindsight, this is why hindsight is twenty - twenty.
Glamour Dolls had to have know there was no way in hell
we were getting this stuff by September but they didn't tell us that.
They even went so far as people saying it was their birthday in September
and they were so excited to get Glamour Doll's products for their birthday
and Glamour Doll's like "yaaayy, we're so excited for you to get them too!"
They knew darn well those people were not getting those products
for their birthday.