Here we are. No question about it, this is a print that should never have left this room. It is misregistered (look at his left leg), the keyblock is poorly printed, and the colours are mottled and weak. I myself check each and every print of the batches produced by our printers, and all I can guess about this is that when I was doing my yes ... yes ... no ... yes ... nope! ... yes .... I must have tossed it onto the wrong pile. The packing ladies then simply followed my instructions, and out it went. There is no one else here to blame for this but me.

Now we got very lucky here; the print ended up in the hands of a very enthusiastic collector of our work, a man who has everything we have produced - all the Ukiyoe Heroes, the Chibi Heroes, and now the Heroes Portraits. It could have gone to somebody as a 'first print' from us! And as you have read in his email, he understands who we are, what we are doing, and is gently concerned that we have headed down a wrong path.

Here is what I wrote back:

This is quite a surprise - that is an awful print, and should never have left this workshop. I'm the one who is supposed to check everything, and I have no excuse for that one getting through.

Our packing ladies are now preparing a replacement for you, and it will leave this morning (along with a little something else in the package). Once it gets there, please destroy the other one; it's not something anybody would want to keep.

If it's OK with you, I'll probably blog about this a bit later this week (I won't use your name, of course). We're having quite a difficult time keeping things together smoothly with the recent huge burst in popularity, and this is a perfect example of how not to move forward, and a very good reminder to us to pay more attention to our core mission - making beautiful prints!

My apologies again for this experience, and I certainly thank you very much for your reasoned response to receiving that defective print!

I'm not sure what else to add at this point. In one sense, it's not a bad thing that this is happening just now, early on in our growth spurt, when we can take the lesson to heart and try to make sure we do better. If people don't let us know about these things, it would be more dangerous, for sure.

Making stuff is difficult. Making good stuff is even more difficult. All we can do is try our best, and then on those occasions when we fall short of our goals, hope that we have built up enough 'merit points' with our supporters, that they will be patient with us.