Clay and Customer Service

Each week I will see 75+ students in the studio. Each year we work on  a 3-D project for the art show. This year we are creating an aviary full of wonderfully exotic birds. We had the armatures all ready for the Sculpey clay.  I don't have a kiln nor do I have room for one so I come up with alternative 3-D projects.

Imagine my dismay and the disappointment of my students when the 8LB box of Sculpey I bought at Hobby Lobby was hard.


As. A. Rock.

Unusable.

So I changed plans and went out to my local Wal-Mart and bought a tub of Crayola Air Dry Clay.  Maybe I should have bought it in the first place because it was way cheaper and I didn't have to take the pieces home and bake them. And you can't go wrong with Crayola brand right?

Wrong.

The Crayola Air Dry was awful! The birds cracked so bad they looked like they had a skin disease.

Now the kids are not only disappointed but discouraged. They worked hard on their armatures and the really FUN part would be painting and embellishing their sculptures and now it looked like we might have to scrap the project and do something else. And we already spent two extra class times on the birds. I did come up with a quick one day art lesson for them to do while waiting for the clay debacle to be solved.

On a whim I decided to email Sculpey and tell them what happened. I spent $52 (including tax) and drove 140 miles round trip to buy the clay. Within 20 minutes of emailing them I got this wonderful response:

Hello.

Thank you for contacting Polyform Products Company and your interest in our products.  I am so sorry to hear about your experience with our Original Sculpey clay.  It sounds like the clay was exposed to heat at the retailer or during the shipping process (perhaps last summer or fall) when it arrived at the store or distribution center.  We would like to replace the clay and send you new clay. Thank you for including your shipping address and we will get the clay out to you.

 

 Best regards,

 

 

 

I received this box via UPS one week later

 was NOT expecting the extra products at all.

 

 

So what did we do about the Crayola product? I ordered some Creative Paper Clay

 for us to go over the birds that were covered in Crayola clay. So far the results have been good. I won't buy Crayola Clay ever again. We will stick with Sculpey and  Creative Paper Clay in the future.