Secondhand Shopping Stories

One of my favorite things to hear about, in this hobby and others, is the history and adventures things have been on since they were made - how they changed hands from owner to owner, where they've been, what the owners have done with them, all of that! I've gotten a few really cool stories just by asking around, so I thought I'd ask here, too!

What's the coolest/funniest/most interesting story behind something you've bought secondhand? It could be how you found it, what the item was used for, who used to own it, anything!

I'll start with one of mine! I got bit by the "I gotta find it NOW" bug for an Obitsu 55 body a while ago (which I'm sure many of you can relate to), and ended up going down a googling rabbit hole that led me to a single Ebay listing for one, from a seller located all the way in France. Tried to buy it, no dice, Ebay gave me a weird error message that said the store was closed. I was just sleep deprived and crazy enough to decide it wasn't worth giving up on, though, so despite the fact that I'm an American that doesn't know a lick of French, I hopped on Google Translate and tried my very best to craft something understandable before sending it to the seller in one last desperate bid to see if maybe, just maybe, I could get my boy.

Turns out the man could read and write English just fine, lol. More interestingly, he was the owner of a little French toy store that had stocked a few of the big Obitsus before going out of business a while ago, and still had them, brand new in their boxes, in storage. A few days, some email negotiations, and a couple hundred euros later, and he was shipped to me, beautifully padded, in a repurposed vaccuum cleaner box. And should Doll Peddlar's supply ever dry up, I have a lead I can contact to get an Obitsu 60 girl too! Sometimes secondhand "luck" is really just having the courage (or the desperation and sleep deprivation, in my case) to follow an unlikely lead!

For a non-doll story (since those are very welcome, too!), I found a pair of beautiful sculptures at a thrift store once, and snapped them up the next day because I couldn't stop thinking about them. Another googling rabbit hole led me directly to the original artist's page, and it turns out my sculptures were a couple decades old! I was even able to find the original listing pictures from when they were first sold, and found out that the person who bought them actually made their own modifications to the sculptures sometime before they ended up in the thrift. I don't know why, but something about the idea of two artists, maybe even more than that, unknowingly collaborating on a piece is so cool to me. If I can come up with a good addition, I'm tempted to add to these sculptures some more myself and carry that conversation on!

 

i found this at my local GOODWILL for around $20 several years back;

 

I'd been eyeing VMF50 on Mandrake for ages, especially Miu because I really wanted a muscular girl. There were a few others with the same type body up for sale with less yellowing, and I was debating getting one of them, but then they ended up all selling out so I just grabbed Miu and now she's one of my fave dolls.

I’ve been browsing Mandarake for over a year (since I purchased my Volks Yayoi Takatsuki) and kept seeing a listing for a Vispo Doll Anohana Flower We Saw That Day. My first impression of the doll was that she was oddly proportioned and almost ugly, but every time I saw the listing, it kept making an impression in my subconscious. Then one day she was marked as sold and I finally gave her a good look by clicking on the listing and seeing all the pictures, and realized woah, she’s NOT ugly, and I like her being kind of odd. I decided that if I ever saw Anohana again, I’d slam that buy button! A few months later while I was ‘just looking’ in the doa marketplace, there she was…the same exact Anohana as the one I saw on Mandarake! The poor seller was so surprised as I was asking to buy her less than 10 minutes of making the listing. They hadn’t even finished editing the pictures. I’m happy to have Anohana, now named Midori, and love her to bits. Even if she has quite a list of cons. I’m just so happy to have lost, then found the exact Anohana. It was meant to be. 

At a used bookstore, I found a manga volume that had my childhood friend's name inscribed on the back of the front cover. Not really terribly out of the ordinary since, of course, we lived in the same area, but I still feel very lucky to have found it. It is very precious to me! 

A couple years after I got my Oldskin MSD Mika, I was scrolling through my Flickr favorites and noticed that I had unknowingly liked a bunch of photos of my exact doll, nearly 3 years before I bought her lol. The photos were taken over a decade ago but she looked identical, and even the clothes were the same pieces that the seller gave me when I bought her! 


 

I used to collect 1/6 dolls in university and fell out of it after I graduated, then got into it again briefly a few years ago when I discovered the Lil’ Fairy dolls. At the time I used Twitter and followed a bunch of Azone’s accounts, but deleted the app shortly after since I tend to lose interest easily.

Fast forward to April of this year, and I got back on Twitter for something entirely unrelated and ended up falling prey to Azone’s aggressive marketing strategies completely by accident. The gateway was new clothing for my Lil’ Fairy, followed by falling in love with some of their 1/6 dolls, and later their 1/3 dolls.

I told myself I couldn’t afford to get into 1/3 dolls (that was a lie) and that I had no interest in them (another lie), but a few trips to the Azone Labelshops in Tokyo and seeing them in person, and next thing I know I’m thinking about them at work and looking them up online…

We all know how this story ends, but basically I looked at all their 1/3 dolls and wanted Alice/Lovely Bear from the Ellen series the most, but figured I wouldn’t be able to find her ever because of her extremely limited run and because so much time had passed since release. I was just about to shell out cash for both Lilia and Luluna from the Black Raven series (yeah, TWO dolls… I couldn’t choose between them… so much for “can’t afford” 🙄), when I checked YJA and there was my dream doll, Alice/Lovely Bear!

Somehow I managed to find her in time before spending a small fortune AND she was NIB (so maybe she doesn’t quite fit the topic, but she was secondhand in the sense that I didn’t get her directly from Azone), and I’m so pleased both with her and having fallen back into this hobby in general 😁

Well, this is a good a place as any to plop down my story... *rubs hands together*

Grab a drink, sit back, and allow me to tell you how not to buy your first Obitsu body used.

Someone on Facebook Marketplace was selling a used female 50 cm Obitsu body with the caveat that there was no head, no wrist or ankle joints, and one of the hip joints was cracked. Also, the vinyl shell was shown in one picture, and the internal frame in the second picture (red flag). I was particularly interested, because I've never owned a vinyl doll that big, and I wanted it already disassembled so I could see how it worked.

The seller and I agreed on $75 USD plus shipping ($10), which I thought was a great price. In the interim, I ordered a head, eyes, replacement ankle joints, and replacement hip joints from Parabox. Also, the doll came with the flat chest, so I ordered a replacement chest. Total cost - about $92 USD, including shipping. I figured I now had some extra parts to try out dyeing different colors, so I didn't mind the fact that it was close to the cost of a new doll.

I received everything and started trying to assemble the doll. I watched many, many hours of Parabox videos. Let me just say - I don't recommend this for your first doll. It was definitely a pain. The internal components have notations for which side is left (the doll's left, not yours) and which side is up, but because this little beast was a hybrid, some of them were in English, and others in Japanese. Thank goodness for Google Lens.

I discovered that not only was the body missing the head, it was also missing the connecting joint. And said connector is sold out, and has been for a while. Still is, in fact. I managed to grab one on eBay for about $20 USD shipped. The one and only time I really wanted to cuss out the seller was trying to get the head onto that connector. That was a nightmare. Don't do that. 

In the process of assembling the doll, I showed it to someone else, who immediately pointed out that the colors didn't match. The joints were a different color from the vinyl shell parts, and the torso vinyl was a different color from the arms and legs. 

I also discovered that female Obitsu bodies come in the following sizes: 40 cm, 45 cm, 47 cm, 48 cm, and 50 cm. On Parabox's website, you'll see that 48 and 50 cm bodies are grouped together... except for the vinyl shins. In the case of the shins, the 47 and 50 cm dolls share the same parts. After I muscled on the shins that came with my doll and tried to put the ankle joints in, I realized that the bottom half of the internal leg piece was sticking out about half a cm. Took a look on the inside of the shins, and realized that I had the 48 cm shins. And at the time, 50 cm shins were also out of stock on Parabox (they are back in stock now - I wish I'd waited). 

So, I bought shins, a replacement lower torso, and some extra hands from Hobby Japan, which totaled about $43 USD, of which about a third, or 1,800 yen ($16.50 USD) was for shipping. Parabox shipping is 2,000 yen (around $18 USD), and you get your order in three business days.

The Hobby Japan order was on July 30, 2021. As far as I can tell, my order isn't in the US yet (it was sent Surface Parcel). If I had waited a couple weeks and spent an extra $1.50 USD, I would have everything I need for the doll. 

This means I have a mismatched doll with no feet that I have spent over $240 trying to assemble. I could have purchased a new doll with a head, eyes, a steel base (I don't have one of those, either), and all in one color from Parabox for around $180 USD ($200 with shipping).

And that is how you don't buy your first doll used. 

 

I have a few stories about how dollie karma and the like tends to work out in odd and surprising ways.  I'll share one such story today.

 

A friend of mine in Texas buys dolls and heads often and she sometimes gets into things she really didn't want or know what she was getting.  She kind of got shafted on a purchase of an 04 head and when it arrived it did not look like she was shown.  She took care of things on her end but did not want to keep the head around because of the drama surrounding it.  So she sent it to me instead of tossing it out because she knows I like trying to fix broken and unwanted dolls.  Here is what she got:

 

20210601_184402 by Billy  Bennett, on Flickr

 

A pretty big mess.  Of course I felt bad for the poor thing so I went to an artist buddy of mine on Discord who had just done 2 other doll heads for me recently.  I asked if she would mind helping me salvage a pretty bad off head.  She asked for pics and I sent her some.  Her reply was NOT what I expected.

It seems that this head was originally done by HER.  She sold it to someone and then they sold it and that last person tried doing something to it and failed.  So they sold to my Texas friend and now it was in my hands.  Here is what it looke dlike when my Discord friend first made it:

 

Screenshot_20210529-075122_Instagram by Billy  Bennett, on Flickr

Screenshot_20210529-075111_Instagram by Billy  Bennett, on Flickr

 

Pretty cute huh?  Now for the sucker punch.  😉  Remember that my Discord friend said she originally painted this head and somehow I had brought it back to her to redo?  Well get this:

Guess where she originally bought this blank 04 from?

Go ahead.....

You already know....

It was ME.  I SOLD HER THE BLANK HEAD.  Almost 2 years ago when she was looking for a cheap vinyl head to practice on since she was just getting into doing vinyls back then.

 

So how friggin insane is that?  A blank head I had sitting around got sold, got customized, sold and went through THREE owners and has wound back up at my house.  If THAT isn't dollie karma kicking in, I don't know what is.  It seems this little 04 girl was meant to be with me.  She just wanted to do some travelling and growing up first.  She has now been sent to get completely repaired and redone.  She will still have her open mouth mod but will be updated and redone to be even cuter than before.  And when I get her back she will be put on a Mochi body and spoiled rotten.  It's the least I can do to welcome her back home. 

 

 

 

 

 

Billy