In January of 2014, James Ahn of Bestia Inc., contacted our company to ask for a meeting so he could discuss prototyping our products. He saw our Kickstarter campaign, which also began in January 2014, and contacted us to see if we'd be able to meet at the upcoming Toy Fair in NY. He emailed me a detailed letter explaining his company's capabilities. He also called me to tell me about his quick turn around times for making a prototype (7-10 day, max).
We decided to meet up in February at Toy Fair in NY.
We met James in NY and he showed us a duffle bag full of great products. He told us his factory had made those products and they were very good at making high end plush. We had our samples with us (we only had 12 samples total because they were very expensive to make), and we were very protective of them but we agreed to send a few of them with James to take back to his factory in China to sample for us. This was in February of 2014. Long story short-- it took them almost 3 months to get us our sample, putting us way behind schedule.
Each of our protos costs a lot of money to produce, and in the end, we ended up having to remake every proto we sent to Bestia Inc. They ruined them. It's customary for factories to take them apart, but James and I discussed this in detail that Bestia would put them back together exactly as they had received them. James assured me this would happen. It didn't.
Unfortunately, we were duped. James and Bestia did produce a very close proto for our small puppy. It was workable with less than 10 adjustments needed. It looked nice, but it was not what we had asked for so he assured us if we paid for the manufacturing, they would easily fix the mistakes on the proto before production began. He convinced us that since lead times for fabrics were long, we needed to pay up front at least half of our costs for our fabric purchases. This totalled roughly $12,000. He wanted us to wire him the money, so we did. He is very charming and nice in person and on the phone.
At this time, we did not have concerns about his character, even though we still had not received our bear and dino protos back yet. He always had an excuse: the factory bought the wrong material, it got held up in customs, shipping is taking longer, they caught a last minute mistake that they need to fix so they brought the shipment back, and on and on. He also said he was going to China to deal directly with the factory so he could get this fixed for us, and not to worry. Over a week went by where I couldn't reach him by email or phone. I was so nervous.
He finally contacted me again and assured me that they were almost done. He said it didn't usually take this long for protos (over 2 months now) and he had no good explanation as to why it's taken so long. Then we demanded (after several nice requests) that he send us the revised puppy proto since we'd already paid for a big chunk of it. They had tried to make our proto a few times already, but everything they sent was wrong, so we sent them a prototype from a competitor who prototyped the puppy for us for cost comparison. Reminder: they had our big animals for a long time (T-rex and Teddy). The only samples we were receiving from them were the small puppy samples -- which they could not get right.
Again, they looked okay but they were not what we asked for. So we sent the competitior's puppy to them, and guess what? We received our sample from them shortly afterwards but it was the exact same puppy we had sent them (the competitor's), but Bestia had put their tags on it-- like they made it! They wanted us to approve the puppy and move forward with the order so they could get the rest of their payment. We caught this fraud because we had opened up the competitor's puppy and made a few designated stitches on the inside to "mark" it. There was also glue residue left on the puppy's pocket from where we removed a glued on patch.
After they sent us a fraudulent sample (the one we supplied them), we knew they were not being forthright with us. We asked for all of our samples back asap. They had been reluctant to send them to us but we needed them in order to make a sale and we communicated that to them so they finally sent them to us. When we received them, they were unusable. They looked like zombie stuffed animals. We had to pay for all new samples and it threw our timeline off.
We contacted James and told him we wanted our money back. He told us that the money we sent was used to pay for fabric. We said we'd send an inspector to sample the fabric and take possesssion of it, but first we wanted original invoices with dates on them to prove he had, indeed, ordered the fabric when he said he did. He claimed to have had all of the fabrics in house and on hand, but he couldn't send us samples with those fabrics? It didn't make sense to us. He said he had the fabrics so he couldn't give us our money back, but then he sent samples with incorrect fabrics, late samples (weeks late), and it was all because he was waiting on the fabric. It didn't add up.
He emailed us and told us he would get us the invoices for the fabrics we ordered and he'd send those to us. He never did. We kindly reminded him that we were waiting on those invoices and he said he had to make new ones. We said we wanted originals. At this point, we asked for our money back. He has ceased communicating with us.
We hired an attorney to initiate negotiations with him but he has ignored all of our attorney's attempts to communicate so we can rectify this situation. This is a very shortened update on everything that we've endured, but it communicates our situation up to this point.
Bestia Inc Reviews
In January of 2014, James Ahn of Bestia Inc., contacted our company to ask for a meeting so he could discuss prototyping our products. He saw our Kickstarter campaign, which also began in January 2014, and contacted us to see if we'd be able to meet at the upcoming Toy Fair in NY. He emailed me a detailed letter explaining his company's capabilities. He also called me to tell me about his quick turn around times for making a prototype (7-10 day, max).
We decided to meet up in February at Toy Fair in NY.
We met James in NY and he showed us a duffle bag full of great products. He told us his factory had made those products and they were very good at making high end plush. We had our samples with us (we only had 12 samples total because they were very expensive to make), and we were very protective of them but we agreed to send a few of them with James to take back to his factory in China to sample for us. This was in February of 2014. Long story short-- it took them almost 3 months to get us our sample, putting us way behind schedule.
Each of our protos costs a lot of money to produce, and in the end, we ended up having to remake every proto we sent to Bestia Inc. They ruined them. It's customary for factories to take them apart, but James and I discussed this in detail that Bestia would put them back together exactly as they had received them. James assured me this would happen. It didn't.
Unfortunately, we were duped. James and Bestia did produce a very close proto for our small puppy. It was workable with less than 10 adjustments needed. It looked nice, but it was not what we had asked for so he assured us if we paid for the manufacturing, they would easily fix the mistakes on the proto before production began. He convinced us that since lead times for fabrics were long, we needed to pay up front at least half of our costs for our fabric purchases. This totalled roughly $12,000. He wanted us to wire him the money, so we did. He is very charming and nice in person and on the phone.
At this time, we did not have concerns about his character, even though we still had not received our bear and dino protos back yet. He always had an excuse: the factory bought the wrong material, it got held up in customs, shipping is taking longer, they caught a last minute mistake that they need to fix so they brought the shipment back, and on and on. He also said he was going to China to deal directly with the factory so he could get this fixed for us, and not to worry. Over a week went by where I couldn't reach him by email or phone. I was so nervous.
He finally contacted me again and assured me that they were almost done. He said it didn't usually take this long for protos (over 2 months now) and he had no good explanation as to why it's taken so long. Then we demanded (after several nice requests) that he send us the revised puppy proto since we'd already paid for a big chunk of it. They had tried to make our proto a few times already, but everything they sent was wrong, so we sent them a prototype from a competitor who prototyped the puppy for us for cost comparison. Reminder: they had our big animals for a long time (T-rex and Teddy). The only samples we were receiving from them were the small puppy samples -- which they could not get right.
Again, they looked okay but they were not what we asked for. So we sent the competitior's puppy to them, and guess what? We received our sample from them shortly afterwards but it was the exact same puppy we had sent them (the competitor's), but Bestia had put their tags on it-- like they made it! They wanted us to approve the puppy and move forward with the order so they could get the rest of their payment. We caught this fraud because we had opened up the competitor's puppy and made a few designated stitches on the inside to "mark" it. There was also glue residue left on the puppy's pocket from where we removed a glued on patch.
After they sent us a fraudulent sample (the one we supplied them), we knew they were not being forthright with us. We asked for all of our samples back asap. They had been reluctant to send them to us but we needed them in order to make a sale and we communicated that to them so they finally sent them to us. When we received them, they were unusable. They looked like zombie stuffed animals. We had to pay for all new samples and it threw our timeline off.
We contacted James and told him we wanted our money back. He told us that the money we sent was used to pay for fabric. We said we'd send an inspector to sample the fabric and take possesssion of it, but first we wanted original invoices with dates on them to prove he had, indeed, ordered the fabric when he said he did. He claimed to have had all of the fabrics in house and on hand, but he couldn't send us samples with those fabrics? It didn't make sense to us. He said he had the fabrics so he couldn't give us our money back, but then he sent samples with incorrect fabrics, late samples (weeks late), and it was all because he was waiting on the fabric. It didn't add up.
He emailed us and told us he would get us the invoices for the fabrics we ordered and he'd send those to us. He never did. We kindly reminded him that we were waiting on those invoices and he said he had to make new ones. We said we wanted originals. At this point, we asked for our money back. He has ceased communicating with us.
We hired an attorney to initiate negotiations with him but he has ignored all of our attorney's attempts to communicate so we can rectify this situation. This is a very shortened update on everything that we've endured, but it communicates our situation up to this point.