Kate’s Tangents – AliExpress

Hey guys, Kate here. Normally, I’d let Ange go off about this in one of her posts or something, but I’ve decided this warrants education more than it does venting, if we’re all being honest. So I’m going to delve a little into the world of AliExpress and why I choose not to go there 

I’d like to preface this by saying if you want to order from AliExpress, that’s on you entirely and I’m not going to tell you that you can’t. You absolutely can. I just don’t recommend it and never will.

AliExpress is based in China. Which in and of itself is not a bad thing. What makes it bad is that a lot of the dolls and doll parts, craft supplies etc. that you’re seeing will ship from China and take a month or longer to arrive. That, however, is the simplest of the reasons for not ordering from AliExpress.

If I’m ordering something that’s going to take that long to come, I want it to be worth the money I’m spending. Is it going to be worth it from AliExpress? Probably not. AliExpress doesn’t tend to carry official branded products. You’re either getting the factory rejects that have defects enough to keep them from making it past what little quality control there is, prototypes that never made it into production, or you’re getting cheap knockoffs of the actual products.

I haven’t ordered from them myself, but I have heard the stories. Rainbow High heads with wonky paint, bodies with jacked up joints. Papercrafting dies that don’t cut through the way the official branded ones do. And I just don’t want to wait more than a month for less than quality items that I could have bought on Amazon or at Target and had by the next day at the latest.

The  bigger issue though is the amount of blatant art theft that is allowed on AliExpress. I have personally seen copies of rubber stamps and dies that were made by small companies listed there, as well as recast BJD dolls, fake reborns etc. These are the work of artists for whom their business is their income. When we buy stolen art off AliExpress, we’re not supporting the artist. We’re taking away from them. And I can’t support that.

That said, I’m not going to run you off my blog or be unfriendly toward you for owning a recast BJD – I don’t approve of it, but I’m not going to get angry because you have one. They are a more affordable alternative and admittedly if you’re going to have one in an environment with kids or animals, the recast might actually be the better option so that you’re not risking an excessively expensive doll. I can’t really be mad at that logic. I just choose not to go that route myself.

It’s just really hard for me to watch people recommend AliExpress for everything doll related when I know for a fact that most of the dolls and doll parts on the site are either defective factory rejects (in the case of large company parts like Rainbow High, Barbie etc.) or flat out stolen artwork being reproduced in lower quality en masse.

If you can afford the actual product and don’t have a circumstantial reason for buying the knockoff, I ask you to reconsider before you purchase from AliExpress and actually buy from the artist/company in question if possible instead of buying the knockoff. You’re doing a good thing for the artists who put their time into creating these things if you can buy directly from them.

Posted In: Kate's Tangents