>>8122590Well, I spent several years trying to get a toy manufactured locally. The biggest problem is that factories don't want to talk to you. At all. They don't provide minimum order quantities or minimum dollar amounts. Forget anything even halfway specific. They just don't answer inquiries or even advertise so it's hard to even find a place to ignore you. It's awful.
I had to resort to trial and error casting silicone molds. That gets expensive and time consuming. If you;re starting from scratch, you don't know what you need so you don't order alot so a fuckup costs two weeks of transit time. In my case, nothing I read said anything about mold release and the place I bought the silicone from didn't even sell it. So, of course, the top of my first mold bonded to the bottom and I had to cut it apart with a fucking pair of scissors. Nothing I casted with the second batch turned out right either.
Then 3D printing started to get noisy. I went to a couple of Maker Faires. None in this area, of course, so I had to travel to NY for both of them. They were a joke. Most of it was about apps and getting Windows 10 on IoT devices. Everything else was either so crude as to be worthless or started off with a $20K investment in 3D scanners, specialized computers, and material that nobody knew the properties of well enough to say if it was good for X or would work with device Y. Just shut up and buy this stuff and forget about it in the closet like fad exercise equipment or language learning tapes.
At one point I was going to settle for a "make your own customized doll" various websites were peddling. But they're useless too. Choose from a "wide" variety of choices....1 hair sculpt, a tank top, and a stapler...that's it. And that's when they didn't run off with your money and start the same scam over at a different domain.
