Possible bootlegged smiling St. Mina (Not suggesting you buy them)

Since CustomHouse has been so lax in making anything............ highly doubt they are legit.
(Dripping with sarcasm........ CH owes so many people dolls right now)

Thank you for the heads up.

 

Thank you for posting this FunnyLori! I never thought that custom house dolls might get bootlegged! Especially that their reputation isn't very good right now. They owe me 2 dolls already >_<

 

Dollmovie sold 3 "happy mina" dolls for 250 a piece.
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dl...nc&si=sPnz%2BcZWIOzk8So%2ByUFSwKAzVLs%3D#shId

 

I did see one St Mina, that I think was genuine - it had the certificate and actually looked different from the others. She was also selling for a lot more and from a US person.

 

Lori, I remember the discussion on ZoZ. Has anyone found out for sure whether the dolls that were purchased from Dollmovie are bootleg?

 

Very sad, that folks will think they could be getting a true St. Mina, when it may not be legit, as with anything counterfeited.

 

This seller is selling both versions of Mina, the happy and the sad one - so I suggest buyers beware of both dolls when purchased as new in 2010 and 2011.
A sad St. Mina with default outfit for 330$ can´t be original imo.

 

There was some discussion about the "Mina" lookalike auctions on the Customhouse Yahoogroup, The Soul Within, too. Some of the members there were speculating at first (before so many of the auctions popped up) that possibly someone who worked or had once worked at Customhouse was quietly selling off old stock--kind of like the old-stock DollTi auctions last year. But that theory was always more hopeful than solid, and now it's looking even less probable, isn't it?

Just thinking out loud here: if these are actually bootleggers, it seems to me that their timing is off. A few years ago, before Customhouse imploded, St. Mina was commanding a high price on the secondary market. The original editions were small, there were more fans of early Customhouse still in the hobby, and recasting/bootlegging was much less widespread than it is now. In, say, 2007 or 2008, anyone who could claim to offer dead-stock Minas would probably have been able to make good money on them. Now--with so many newer BJD owners who only know about the late, unreliable Customhouse--not many people even recognize St. Mina on sight, much less think of her as a desirable doll. If I were going into the bootleg business, I think I would choose a more popular doll to recast . . .

. . . although that leads me to a third thought. I wonder whether all the original CH molds were sent to whatever casting company CH started using toward the end, and now those casters are producing dolls on the side from those molds? It seems odd that anyone would think St. Mina (or any early CH doll--sad to say, because I love them!) was a good choice for recasting. But if the headmold and the body-part molds were sitting around, it would be relatively simple to put them to use, and bootleg those unauthorized casts. That's only speculation, of course! But I'm always fascinated by this "shadow side" of BJD making, and how it might actually work.

 

Looks like a new seller with 0 feedback is posting the same St. Mina auctions again. Oh joy. "Not bad product at all". Oh, now I'm reassured lol.