This is the first time that I've heard anything bad about them. "Den of thieves"?
I have been out of the loop for years though.
Thanks, Moviefreak for spelling it out. As a person that dabbled in replica movie items when my military surplus sales dwindled, I lived months of this.
It takes a lot of work up front, a massive amount of money... and people are SO IMPATIENT! It causes so much stress. There are so many steps, and things take so much time. People think that taking 1 or 2 years to get your props are unacceptable, however it's actually very common with these small business ventures trying to make these products.
Big companies have the ability to work on projects in secret, and then announce their product when it's almost ready to ship, to get people jazzed up and ready to buy.
Small prop makers need to have funding, so they get the customers in on the pre-order to fund the project, and then they get very upset when they have to wait months and months. I've spent more time dealing with impatient customers, then I have spent time processing orders of people that "pay up and shut up".
I had bought a few things from MR and SD, and I've been very happen with them.
Even though I had a mix up where I didn't get my MR prop for over 2 years. I paid them, and I eventually got it, and it's of very high quality. I don't mind the wait, because I plan ahead.
When I took a big leap into making costume stuff, and put some large bucks down, and took pre-orders, I had delay after delay, which even included a death. Customers didn't accept this as an excuse. There were rumors that I was running off with the money, (even though the money instantly went to pay for the loan which I used to get started to begin with???), and rumors that I wasn't "delivering", and rumors that I wasn't answering emails. Claimed emails that I never answered, were never presented to me, and I spent hours looking for them.
This resulted in a "What Does Aaron Horrocks Owe You?" post, which there were no replies. I ended up getting banned from several communities, over accusations and no evidence. Costumes, cosplay, replica props, have the worst people as customers. There are witch-hunts abound. I'm not defending MR or SD, but I myself, and others have had our reputations destroyed over rumors and people getting whipped up into a frenzy.
My previous experience was in engineering, and construction, and many of the projects that I worked on took 6 months, 1 year, or 2 years, sometimes longer. Of course, I was involved from start to finish, on projects that were hundreds of thousands of dollars, or even over a million dollars. The big players in the industry know how long things can take, because they have experience. It was always the small one time customers, the home owners or small business owners that caused the most headaches and were upset because their project took 4-6 months (or longer), even though that was normal.
