This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/hobbydrama by /u/Mysterious-Tea1518 on 2024-06-04 18:40:22+00:00.

Setting the scene

The time is the early/mid-2000s, when both internet drama and I, personally, peaked. It’s the age of the web forum, where entire communities have popped up around literally anything. Starting first as a yahoo group, the My Little Pony Trading Post and later the My Little Pony Arena arose from the depths of the internet to corral fans of plastic horses long before Friendship is Magic would capture the collective imagination.

At the time, collectors were seeking out then only relatively recently discontinued Generation one  (G1) and Generation 2 (G2) MLP.  Primarily the former as the later was accused of 2000s pop star anorexia, glorifying unhealthy body images for pastel pink ponies everywhere. You might imagine that with G1 ending in the US in 1992, and G2 dying a slow and painful death first in the US then through Europe in the 2000s, this is a group of die-hard fans of a failed toy line desperate to get their hands on more plastic crack.  Most of the conversation around the community at the time fell in one of two camps:

1.      Look at this toy I’ve found at a: yard sale, church sale, flea market, thrift shop, or even on occasion an actual dumpster.

OR

2.      How do I make my dumpster pony look not disgusting?

 Much collective brainpower went into topic #2. Enthusiasts worked diligently exploring new cleaning techniques which at the time were new life-changing innovations like the Magic Eraser. However, since these are children toys, the answer is sometime a heavy lift.  Mohawk from a kid who just found scissors? Or maybe the pony is so beyond repair that it requires something more drastic?

Forged in the same fire of the newly budding reborn community, collectors began to learn to re-thread hair into their plastic horses. It’s fairly straightforward using a needle and thread (or later a tool- let me tell you, this is an inferior method, but that’s another discussion) to weave hair back into the toy. Interest began to grow for custom ponies, that’s painting the body, it’s cutie mark (symbols on a horse butt), and changing the hair color entirely to give it a new identity.

Where do you get hair?

Early on some people used hair extensions, human hair (ew), or other doll hair to fix their ponies. But where it really stood out was when you were trying to repair a pony with existing hair- you don’t want to get rid of it all, but maybe you just need a little more in some places. Maybe just a tail. It was almost impossible to find hair that matched.

As they do in niches, companies popped up that provided loose hair for toy repair. Mostly they started in the doll hair space, focusing on repairing vintage Barbies whose prices had begun to climb. Barbies and My Little Ponies actually use a different hair type. Barbies use saran, while MLP use nylon. And with the specialization, companies primarily sold natural colors like human-blonde or human-brunette that look a bit… weird… on a pink horse’s head.

A few companies would come and go, but one came onto the scene that managed to lead the pack. While others faltered with poor UX on their websites, bad photography, or poor product, Dollyhair stuck out for having passable photography and website and *really good* hair. I’m talking hair that matched so closely to the originals, it’s almost impossible to tell. More than that, the site laid out original ponies and what their matching colors were. You could just go online, find the pony you had, find the hair it needed, and easily sew that hair back into your pony. This gained more and more attention as into the late 2000s/2010s prices began to rise and supply in thrift shops and garage sales dried up.

Dollyhair

Owned by a woman named Tina, Dollyhair had a damn good product and people wanted it to repair their plastic horses. In 2003, Generation 3 made it onto the scene, gaining even more collectors. More than that, people were beginning to customize these easily available My Little Ponies to an extreme, with gorgeous linework, custom dying or airbrushing.  Conventions popped up to celebrate MLP collecting and the art continued to grow. And, suddenly, Monster High entered the scene and built up customization demand even further. That’s another story for another writer but the crossover was so prolific there was first a Monster High board within the MLP forum, MLPArena, then it grew onto its own. What I’m saying is, Dollyhair was selling a metric fuckton of hair as a preferred vendor for toy collectors. They were well loved as a vendor, with an incredibly niche captive audience, almost NO competition AND the most premium product on the market.

What could go wrong? Well you could be batshit insane and ungrateful of your incredibly forgiving audience.

Order Delays

People would order from Dollyhair and it would take months to receive your order. You’d send an email- no response. “Oh, she has a new baby!” someone says. “Oh, she’s on vacation!” someone says.²  This continues in a loop forever, where months pass and then eventually stuff arrives maybe. Maybe it’s the right order. Maybe it’s not. Luckily, it’s toy horse hair, so no one’s life is on the line.

 She got away with this for a LONG time. If people wanted it quick, they would trade amongst themselves or settle for lower quality competitors. Feedback threads even have evidence of someone offering to share their own correct order to cover her loss out of their pocket just to help a fellow collector.

Doxxing

But if you’re batshit insane, eventually it’s gotta blow. The first example of this I can find is in 2006. Unfortunately, the original post is no longer available however the user’s description of the situation is.

In that user’s words: “I placed a large order of hair with her, and to make a long story short, she didn’t send it in a timely fashion, and when I made a feedback post about it, she registered for the board and flew off the handle at me, haranguing me like she was crazy over PM and showing the entire board what a nut she could be in the feedback thread, which I had initially even offered to delete/retract once I got my hair. She also took the liberty of my posting personal info (name and address) on the thread until the mods told her to remove it.”³

That’s right, you could go ahead and publicly doxx your fanbase.  Turns out she had printed a label but never sent the order just delivered the tracking. Eventually the user got an incomplete order and she refused to fix it. Nevermind though, as people *continued to order from her* as she had one of the most accessible and high-quality products. What were we supposed to do?

Enter Heidi

With acknowledgement that there was not a lot of options, a new site (mylittleponyhair.com) emerged!! And if you were worried about the quality, don’t be! Because this isn’t just ANY hair, it’s dollyhair! That’s right, Tina of Dollyhair was SO KIND as to sell mylittleponyhair.com their hair, because the new owner Heidi is her sister! Afraid of ordering from Dollyhair because of Tina’s bad behavior but great quality? Nevermind, this is HEIDI!⁴ Now, collectors are trusting but they aren’t dumb. This was quickly called out, that Heidi had appeared and started a new site immediately after Tina had flounced out of the community. In fact, little mention is made of this website anywhere in the future aside to say that dollyhair and mylittleponyhair are the same site and its stock is tied. ⁵

Hope you’re hungry

To note in this bad behavior is how absolutely personally Tina took all of this. As Heidi disappeared into the background and Tina took center stage again, she was accused of many different bad behaviors. My personal favorite, someone left her a bad review online which led to her taking their personal information and ordering *five different pizzas* to their house, then later getting a call stating “hope it was worth all that hair, honey! Enjoying that pizza, you fat mother f-ing cow!”  as well as the same user getting early morning calls about orgies and people showing up to their house for a yard sale they never had. ⁶

It’s the intern’s fault

Somewhere down the line, people were getting their stuff eventually but found that it wasn’t quite as normal. Hair is sold in hanks, or a small handful of a continuous circle of hair that is then cut and divided into hanks. These hanks are then made into plugs (about 15-30 strands of hair) and sewn into the pony. Each hank, typically, is 1 oz and about enough to put hair in a pony. Unless you order from Tina, because suddenly people weren’t able to fill an entire pony’s mane with a hank.  One by one people came online and complained, and then started weighing out hanks. They were all, consistently, short.  People began to ask if this was the new normal, or if their shipping (which appeared to be flat-rate) would decrease because of the decrease in product received. No dice. Instead, Tina showed up in a huff to claim that she had hired a new assistant, and it was her assistant’s fault.  This assistant never appeared again.*

So clearly the community, seeing this bad behavior, wouldn’t continue supporting her right?  No. Wrong. With the opinion of “well people got their stuff eventually” and “it’s still the best hair you can buy” people continued shopping.  Tina would shape up a little, ship things on time for a spell, then once again lapse. Your order would b…

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