Hey Lime Crime! Xenia! Doe Deere!

EDIT Nov 13, 2009: There’s now a followup to this entry.

Teaching is a wonderful gift. The tutorials you created and posted have interested a lot of folks. And sharing love of bright color and sparkly things? Well, I’m hardly going to say that that’s a problem - take a look at my own collection, over 900 colors from several MMU vendors. You’ve done some things quite right, and quite well, and in a positive manner.

However.

Buying product from somewhere else, putting a gigantic markup on it, and then trying to say that it’s your 100% original creation doesn’t always work out too well - especially not when others find out about it. Repackaging/reselling? Not a problem. Over half the world resells something in one form or another. Repackaging/reselling with the ginormous markup? There’s a wee bit of a problem with that - but one could argue that the sellers prices a thing at whatever the market will bear, so in some respects the folks who pay that much money for something to which you add very little value are either still learning about MMU and don’t yet realize that they can buy the same product elsewhere for less money, or they do know and honestly don’t care. It’s their wallet, fine and dandy. But claiming that you create these yourself? That actually comes fairly close to breaking the law, I believe. In any event, when folks do find out that you’re little more than a repackager who just loves marketing because it lets you spin the most outrageous tales and get people to do whatever you want them to, some are going to be annoyed. You can get peeved, but blaming them is just pointless. That’s like a cat burglar who trips when breaking into someone’s window, then tries to sue the homeowner for placing a table right by that window. Or the folks who sued McDonald’s because their hot coffee burned the person when they put it between their legs, and it spilled. You’re getting caught being stupid. You can try to shift blame, but you are not currently a creator of original makeup, mineral or otherwise. You’re repackaging, adding a huge markup and not necessarily adding a corresponding huge value, and trying to claim that you’re creating everything yourself…when as of late fall 2009, according to the evidence, you’re not creating things yourself…nor are you above a little bit of misrepresentation from time to time.

Either your product is good enough to stand on its own, without you trying to mislead people about its origins…or it isn’t. It looks like you think it isn’t.

There is a little bit more to the message.