Hi everyone! I wanted to come here and share a complete guide to how our brand, Mochipan, works, where you can find updates, and any other relevant information to ensure you are not confused! Let's get into it.

How Mochipan Works

This section outlines our exact work flow and pre-order process.

Pre-Orders

1. Once we have a finished prototype, we will put our products up on our website, www.mochipan.com, for pre-order.
2. Pre-orders last two weeks.
3. After the two week period, we will do one of two things:
   1. Mark the item as sold out, and no longer allow purchases
   2. Mark the item as a limited pre-order, and continue to sell only what we have ordered from the manufacturer in terms of quantity. (most likely we will do this one, and only in rare instances will we do #1)
4.  Once the item has finished its bulk manufacturing, we will package it and ship it straight to you.
   

Why Pre-Orders?

We use pre-orders for many reasons. Put simply:

1. It allows us to make more unique designs. Pre-orders allow us to take more risks as a business. Typically, a business will just stock every item they intend to sell without gauging interest first. This often results in more simple, easy-to-sell silhouettes and styles.
2. It helps us produce the right amount. Instead of guessing demand, we can be very specific with how many pieces we produce.
3. It reduces waste. Producing closer to actual demand means fewer unwanted garments sitting in a warehouse or in a landfill.
4. It keeps prices more reasonable. Taking pre-orders reduces some of the financial risk involved in producing complicated, custom garments, and allows us to keep a roof over our heads.

Updates / Where Do I Find Information??

We send out a newsletter update every 2 weeks. You can subscribe to this newsletter HERE. (bottom of page)

We also post this newsletter as a blog to our website, you can view the newsletter blog HERE.

We have a progress tracker you can view HERE.

We have a calendar that organizes all of our launches, restocks, and important dates HERE.

You can access the interest check leaderboard HERE.

You can access the interest check items HERE.

You can view the interest check items currently in progress HERE.

You can access the main Mochipan blog HERE.

In Stock Orders

In stock orders ship roughly 24-72hrs after you place the order. Please note that if you order a pre-order item with your in stock item, we cannot ship until all the items are regarded as "in stock". This means that your order will only ship once the pre-order has arrived at our warehouse.

Interest Check??

Our interest check system was invented by Rae, our founder, to help organize interest in our designs. We put the designs up on our website, and you can vote for your favorites as well as view the leaderboard. After 6 months of being on this leaderboard, we take the highest ranking ones (2500 votes or more) and put them into our sampling queue. The sampling of these items can take anywhere from 6 months to over a year.

Why Does Stuff Take So Long??

The short answer is that most Mochipan pieces are original designs made specifically for us, often involving custom fabrics, trims, hardware, prints, or unusual construction. We aren’t choosing finished clothing from a catalog and adding our label to it. We develop our clothing from the design stage all the way through manufacturing. With this process comes many challenges, potential delays, and hurdles we have to overcome. 

Here is our rough process:

1. Research is done, concept is roughly laid out
2. Rough sketches are done
3. Final sketches are done, and these are posted to our socials or our interest check system
4. We wait and see how they are received
5. Designs with good reception/a lot of votes will move into sampling
6. Sampling begins, we decide fabrics, trims, and work on the fit of the garment
   1. This step will repeat as many times as necessary to ensure the garment is high quality and accurate to the design. Sampling often requires 3-4 rounds.
7. When the final garment is ready, we photograph it and put it on the website
8. From there, we open a pre-order (most likely), or we stock it as an in stock product.

This entire process takes at least 6 months on the short end, and can take upwards of 2 years. (IMPORTANT: this is the timeline from initial concept to finished product—not the amount of time you should expect to wait after placing a pre-order.) We do not like our projects taking this long, and try our best to keep it within 6 months to 1 year maximum, but some projects are just too complex, or have too many hiccups along the way to make this possible. Please know we are always doing our best to balance the schedule with the amazing quality you expect from our pieces.

There is an important distinction between how long it takes us to create a Mochipan product and how long you wait for a pre-order. A design may have already been in development for months—or even years—before you ever see the finished sample available for purchase. If you purchase a pre-order, the estimated shipping date will be listed. You should expect all pre-orders to take no longer than 5 months, with the majority of them finishing in 2 months on average.

What is the Point to All This??

This might seem like a lot, and quite overwhelming to the average consumer, and we totally get that! At Mochipan, we believe the fashion industry has a ton of problems. While we don't necessarily think we can solve all of these problems and change the world (maybe some day!), we hope to, at the very least, be a brand that practices fashion in the way we wish more brands would. That means:

1. Honesty and transparency. You should know where your items come from, who is involved in the process, what the issues are, what the fabric is made of, etc. You should have all of this information easily available to you as a consumer.
2. Ethical manufacturing. We strongly believe people deserve to be paid for their work, and we ensure every hand that a Mochipan garment passes through on it's way to you is compensated fairly for their part. You can read more about our ethical commitment on our blog.
3. Sustainability practices. Calling Mochipan "sustainable" has never felt completely fair to us, as it is nearly impossible, if not actually impossible, to be truly sustainable, and we do not want to be misleading. That being said, we practice sustainability wherever possible, and continue looking for new options as we grow.
4. Quality products. We work very hard to ensure every product is up to our standards. We have 3 rounds of quality checks for every batch of production. One happens at the factory, one happens when the products are packed, and the third happens at the warehouse, where several of each item are selected at random and highly scrutinized. That being said, sometimes things still slip through the cracks, but we are always here to help in those instances. We want you to rest assured that your money is well spent with us.
5. Originality. Unlike so many other brands, we do not copy, heavily reference, or flat out steal anyone's products or ideas. As a consumer these days it is almost impossible to tell what is real vs. what is AI, what is someone's original product vs. what is stolen, etc., and we truly hate this about the current industry. All of our products are originally designed by Mochipan and developed specifically for our brand.

6. Commitment. We are committed to improving every chance we get. Mochipan is made up of real people, and we know we won’t always get everything right. We’ve made mistakes. We’ve experienced delays longer than we ever wanted, products have occasionally fallen short of our standards, and we know that some customers have walked away disappointed. We don’t want to hide from those experiences. We want to learn from them.

   When something goes wrong, we look at why it happened, what we could have done differently, and what we can change to prevent it from happening again. Over the years, those lessons have shaped the way we design, manufacture, quality-check, communicate, and operate as a company.

   We will never promise to be perfect. What we can promise is that we will keep listening, learning, and working to be better than we were yesterday.

Where Can I Contact You?

Please email our support team: support@mochipan.com

While we can receive and do sometimes check DMs, it is an overall unreliable way to contact us, so please be careful and ensure you are emailing us!

Thank you all for your support, and for reading this post <3