The nature of the beast

If you're anything like me it's no big deal if your bear breaks, you can just turn it into a Zombie. Zombies are meant to have bits missing, but why did it break in the first place?

Well it's the nature of the beast I'm afraid.

I know your bear isn't a toy, it's a collectible figurine for proper grown ups, but toys are a good place to start.
Your average toy figurine for kids is made from injection moulded plastic. An aluminium or steel two part hard mould is produced and hot melted plastic is injected into it. The mould it's self will cost about £1000. But that's just for a simple mould, to make one part. more parts means more complexity, that means more money.
The big toy companies make this pay by selling a million. (when you sell a million the percentage of cost attached to tooling is small) and they're all painted by machines.

The bears are made a completely different way.

We use rubber moulds.
The nice thing about rubber moulds is you can bend and peel the mould away from the figurine (some thing you can't do when the mould is made from metal) This means that we can add much more detail to the figure. The material used isn't plastic, it's a poly-resin. This process lends it's self well to short runs in production. because after a while the rubber starts to absorb the resin and eventually there's so much resin in the rubber the rubber and the resin stick together then the mould rips, and you've got to make another mould from your original. (The most I've managed to get out of a mould myself is 50)

So the resin is good for extra detail and short runs. Making your bears rare and highly detailed, but poly-resin is brittle, and will break like plastic won't.
Sometimes we fuck things up in the packaging and bears get broken before they even get to you. This happens because we are always trying to push the boundaries of what you can do with the medium, and sometimes we go too far (sorry) having said that we have noticed that some collectors are plagued with receiving broken bear after broken bear, whilst others don't get any. It's probably not your postman himself, kicking his sack up the street, but the sorting office must resemble a wild west bar fight.

On a separate note, we're bad taste, what with all the drugs and sex with sheep, but how bad taste are you? Leave an anonymous comment and tell us your secret. How weird are you lot?