Complaint Review: Wayneston Bears - Internet

My sister had the credits to a design she commissioned an artist to make, based off of her ideas stolen by that artist. The artist in question is Wayne Lim, who runs a soft sculpture making business called Wayneston Bears. He’s from Singapore. He makes expensive teddy bears. He calls them soft sculptures and he charged my sister $325 a pop for one of those stinkers and she bought three. The soft sculptures she bought were in the form of dragons. 

My sister had commissioned her expensive as hell dragons, with the intention of purchasing three unique, One of A Kind exclusive pieces. She DID NOT want to own something that Wayne Lim of Wayneston Bears had already been selling on his website. She wanted to own three pieces that she knew no one else in the world owned. To ensure that her pieces were in fact, owned by no one else, she asked Wayneston Bears to modify his original design to include her own ideas. Her ideas were horns, ears and a patchwork color pattern. When Wayneston Bears sent her her order he included with her purchase individual certificates of authenticities that clearly certified (bearing his signature) that the pieces she had purchased were One Of A Kind.


Then, two months later, my sister saw on Wayneston Bear’s Facebook page that he had created an exact replica of the dragon design, that contained not only the horns and ears idea, but a color combination that she had picked out herself (one that Wayneston Bear had lacked the vision to see at first and had, at one point even objected to on the grounds that pink and brown would “not look nice together”). Wayneston Bears tries to downplay and misrepresent what he did by claiming he made a “similar” dragon for another collector. It was not a “similar” dragon. It was an identical copy. Because he had removed the photograph of the dragon from the internet, we can no longer see it, but someone had taken a screenshot of the replica and saved the picture before it was removed, so thank god we saved the proof! My sister, felt as though her intended One-Of-A-Kind collectibles that she spent $975 USD on had been devalued by the identical copy. So my sister emailed Wayneston Bears to express her feelings.
 My sister expressed the following:


1) Wayneston Bears has no right reproduce a dragon with the ears and horns and patchwork color without her permission as those particular ideas were given to him by her. He did not not have the artistic vision to come up with those ideas himself.


2) Her order was custom made with the intention of owning something special and unique and OOAK and the existence of the exact copy trumps the point of her order.


At first, my sister requested compensation for Wayneston Bears replicating a design containing her ideas in the form of a 35% commission of every replication or in the form of $975 (what she paid for, for the custom order in which Wayneston Bears obtained her idea). However, upon realizing that her requests may be excessive, she changed her request to a simple desire to return and refund her original order, and to have written acknowledgement from Wayneston Bears of the truth which is that the ideas were given to Wayne Lim by her and that did not come up with it on his own as he had claimed on his website. She had stated clearly in public that she did not want to take money from Wayne Lim, because she realized that money is important to him and because it is more important to him than it is to her, she will only request her share of the credits and also to return and receive a refund of her dragons on the grounds that she had paid for OOAK pieces, that are no longer OOAK and therefore not what she paid for. Wayneston Bears later writes a blog post about the conflict and conveniently left this part out of his blog post rant.
 In Wayneston Bear’s blog post he complained that false references were made about him by my sister and that his character had been “deformed” (known by most people as “defamed”). Though none of the accusations my sister stated publically has been false, she has provided evidence including full email exchanges with Wayneston Bears And any “deformation” of his character were merely drawn from his own actions and his own poor conduct. He also complained that her friends were sending him harassing and threatening email spams. He left out the part where my sister waited days for his response to her request to return the dragons and he ignored her emails. I also sent emails to state my sister’s request to return the dragons, and he ignored those too. 


Finally, after fighting this for so long and waiting for him to respond, my sister has lost any hope that Wayneston Bears will be willing to help her resolve her issues so she opened a paypal dispute in the hopes that she will at least get back her last payment (the paypal dispute only allows her to regain half of what she had paid for for her original order, not the full amount). As soon as the paypal case was opened Wayneston Bear was heard from!! But he still didn’t email her, or try to make things right with my sister. What did he do? He went to paypal to fight the paypal dispute to try to prevent the customer her wronged from getting some small justice by claiming a little bit of her money back and then he wrote that blog post about her, trying to play the victim.


The amazing thing in the entire blog post is that he is now asking my sister to give him money! He claims that he never promised that her piece would be One of A Kind (the certificate of authenticity he sent her would prove otherwise), and that exclusivity to a design with ideas she had contributed and commissioned him to make was not included in the cost of her order, and to ensure a One of A Kind piece she would have to pay him extra, on top of the $975 she already paid! (Does he even know how much money $975 USD Is? That is A LOT OF MONEY for someone to be spending on a stuffed toy!) She wasn’t even asking him for money, she just wanted to return her order since he tarnished the value of her order, and now he wants HER to pay HIM? 
So yes, he made a collector a promise that she was purchasing a One of a Kind piece, issued her a signed certificate of authenticity to ensure that, and then broke that promise by making an exact copy, then ignored my sister’s emails for a week and didn’t show up until he finally saw that he might lose some cash and then immediately after ensuring that she doesn’t have a chance of getting some money back asks her to pay him more. 
Not to mention, he makes a blog post with little evidence to support his claims, quotes taken out of context with misleading or flat out false information!
 All she wants is to return an order, he could at least give her that. But instead of working the issue out with her, he ignored her for a week then wrote a blog post to complain about her.

So basically, if you have a great idea for a design, stay away from this seller. He will take your designs, promise to use them to make you a one of a kind piece, give you a certificate of authenticity that means squat, and then make a replica of that design that you paid to be one of a kind, for another customer and then claim all the credit for your design. Then he’ll go on and on and on and pretend to know the law, when he knows nothing about the law, trying to tell you all the reasons why you have no right to the design that had been made from your ideas, and why it’s completely his, even though he didn’t have the creativity to come up with those ideas himself. And then he’ll try to make you pay him extra, to ensure that your purchase is One of a Kind even though he has already sent you a Certificate of Authenticity stating that it was. And he’ll write a blog post about you. He will do all of this, but he will never, under any circumstance, no matter what you do or say, email you back to help you resolve the issue or to allow you to return your worthless order for a refund. He’ll also try to block you from winning your paypal case, because he doesn’t care about his business or his customers, he just cares about the money.