Quality Control (Part 2)

I ordered one of my own prints at the german artist platform "mygall" to get an idea of the appearance. That was just before christmas, and when it arrived (I had it sent to the office) I got a notice from one of my colleagues that it's damaged - the glass was broken. I thought that these things can happen once in a while and inspected it.

The packaging was practically a joke. How any of their framed products can arrive at a buyer without getting damaged (at least if glass is involved) is a mystery to me. The framed print was roughly wrapped in bubble wrap, and around that was cardboard - and that was it! No filling material to stabilize the product, hinder it from moving around and damped vibration during transport. Poor!



I left it there at the office, gave them a call, claimed a replacement which the friendly person at the telephone of course granted me. That was 2 weeks ago. I haven't heard from them ever since, nor has the replacement arrived. I can understand that, it was christmas & new year, they might haven taken a time off, but nevertheless, a short message with an order confirmation and a price 0f 0,00€ would simply have made things clear for me. As it is now, I don't know if there's anything in the making, if they forgot me, or whatever.

So, today was my first regular day at the office again, and I inspected the product closer now. Let's see what the description on the website says for the framed prints:

"Unsere hochwertigen Holzrahmen machen aus mygall-Kunstdrucken stilvolle Kunstwerke. Ultraklares Premium-Acrylglas bietet bruchfesten Schutz und lässt Ihr Kunstwerk noch leuchtender erscheinen."

(translation: "our high quality wooden frames turn the mygall Fine-Art prints into classy pieces of art. Ultra clear premium acryl glass offers break-proof protection and lets your art appear even more glowing")

The reality is a bit different from that. The "high quality wooden frame" turns out to be a light-weight coated MDF (ok, I think MDF is made from wood fibres, but is that what you expect when you read "wooden frame"?). How break-proof the glass is might be arguable due to the poor packaging, but why and how this is called "ultra clear premium acryl glass" I do not understand. It's a thin, standard 2-3mm glass. The passe-partout was poorly cut and had some curves where it shouldn't. And when you take the whole product in your hands it's surprising how lightweight it actually is (without the glass, I mean - I carefully removed the cullets).

The print quality itself is OK - it's a tiny bit darker than what I see on my calibrated monitor, but it's no problem. Detail is exactly the same as I have on screen (which is to be expected with today's high resolution photo printers).

So much for that. All in all - I'm disappointed. Especially by the cheap MDF frame and the unprecisely cut passe-partout. I removed the link the MyGall from the left sidepanel of the blog for now, and I won't upload new photos.

Addendum: of course. One day after posting this, I got the replacement. The packaging was the same, but it arrived undamaged. And it's good! And it actually confuses me more, because now it is a real wooden frame indeed. The passe-partout is perfect now too - and it has a slighly different color. The first one was plain white, the new one is like a little bit of creme/beige. This goes along with the black & white print better, actually. It seems that mygall has different subcontractors that do the actual printing & framing. It bothers me that the quality is so different. If someone orderer through "my" gallery there now and would get the quality that I got first (the damaged one) I'd be unhappy. If it was of the quality of the replacement delivery, that would be ok.