Without prejudice
This post is only intended for Tiny Land and its associates who’ve openly been making public accusations, or acting in a damaging way to us on the premise of TL’s accusations.
Mainly, completely speculative accusations that we are:
- Trying to steal TL’s recipes
- Trying to damage her business or devalue and acquire her business
- Benefiting from knowing the business ‘secrets’ unfairly
- Attacking them to benefit our new products launch
The following are our FINAL answers.
Including Financial Disclosure. We have no NDA obligations.
Going forward, when we see anything relating to these accusations by Tiny Land or anyone, or seemingly influenced by these claims, from anyone, we’ll point to this article, instead of replying individually.
1. Alison King’s ongoing claim that we’re trying to steal TL’s recipes
Firstly, in March 2022, we started working on making food grade colours for wood stain for toy making. [see image, foot note 1] this was ~5 months prior to our first contact with TL (Aug 2022)
We also took a basket full of our colour sample swatches to our first meeting with her. The communications with our supplier and what we did to make our stains is well documented. TL is fully aware of this fact.
The test stains we made between March – June 22, independently, were already made with the IDENTICAL method and materials to TL’s recipe. Just google ‘how to make wood stain with food colours’. You’ll immediately see the result. i.e. Adding food colouring to vinegar.
TL is fully aware of the following fact:
1. We’d already started making our stains months before we engaged with her for the first time
2. We were already using the same supplier
3. This is NOT a special recipe, but a basic and commonly known approach. Period.
Regardless of this, she continues making these outright defamatory public claims. [footnote to add here]
We’re making this disclosure here as she continues making absurd claims against us and we intend to defend ourselves. We have no NDA. Any non-disclosure so far has been based on pure good will towards her position. For example, we know for a fact that a few colourants she uses are outright banned for all food in the USA. We have not disclosed this in particular to anyone before.
Secondly, we paid Alison King £12,500 towards the business acquisition + £1,200 for moving all goods (including junk and stuff we don’t need, but as a favour because she needed them moved out asap), and £2,000 for legal.
Total minimum £15,700 cost to us.
Not including any of our time or staff time which is substantial.
Then many issues continued to arise and it was not possible to move forward, we did not reach final agreement on the acquisition. The payment was based on our letter of intent only. (will disclose more details if needed). Based on legal advice, we withdrew from the acquisition.
We asked for a full refund and wanted to return the stock.
She never replied to our legal letter. We announced that we may have to start selling the stock to recover our loss if she doesn’t refund. (The stock was only worth a fraction of what we paid). No response.
We left her alone and never harassed her even once, assuming she would not/not be able to pay back the money anyway, we just decided to move on and take the loss.
We had 3,483 bottles worth of sellable dye/pigment stain after going through all unsellable ones. This was audited.
The cost comes to £4.5 per bottle.
We’ve been selling them at £6.99 to get rid of them fast, to recover some of the loss.
After various costs of the sale [add footnote for calculations], we’re left with around £2. So, for each bottle we sell, on average, we LOSE £2.5
Considering we’re not counting in any of our time, there’s no point in selling these. Discarding them all would be wiser, because this is dragging us down for many other reasons.
But like many, we just hate throwing things into the drain when others can use it…
Currently it looks like it will still be a while to sell them all.
Someone might say we were totally fleeced. We were. But we also know Alison King will never return our money. So we don’t bother wasting time.
We never complained either to TL since (what’s the point?) nor ever complained in public. (While we’re quietly selling this stock to recover some of our loss, she suddenly came out of nowhere (in 2023) making claims that we stole her business and recipe in public, influencing her audience to come to our business pages, abuse us and try to cause damage.)
We still have years worth of stock that we simply can’t get rid of fast enough.
We don’t know what her motivation is behind her ongoing *PUBLIC* claim that we’re trying to steal her recipes. She fully knows there’s nothing to steal there for us. So we do not see this as innocent claim.
2. Alison King openly claims that we’re trying to damage and devalue her business and that this is our ‘strategy’ to acquire her business.
If we really wanted to damage her business and if we were malicious, these would be our options, instead of making a post on our social feed for 10 views:
- TAKE LEGAL ACTION AGAINST Alison King personally (the transaction was with her personally) to reclaim the £15,700 cost to us plus all our time lost so far (a lot), damage to our business from her false public defamation (of us stealing and being ‘liars’) and full legal costs because it now turns out that the core claims of the products that lead us to initiating the acquisition were NOT TRUE in the first place, namely: Safe for children/the safest in the market (for all applications including crafts, toy making) & Plastic Free.
The entire claim that added any value for this food dye vinegar recipe was the claim for these products as being the SAFEST in the market for CHILDREN and PLASTIC FREE. [see footnote 2 ] – all of them highly questionable at best and flat out false at worst.
This was the main SELLING POINT she tried to sell her business to us for. Had we ever bought this business, we would find ourselves selling products based on entirely unethical and highly problematic marketing claims to our customers as well as in regulatory NON-COMPLIANCE with many legal risks. We would find ourselves totally scammed.
We would’ve NEVER tried to buy this business in the first place had we known that how dubious these claims are. - Report the issues to Trading Standards for investigation (there’s a long list of non-compliance here)
- Inviting larger consumer groups to review the claims as well as publishing the damaging material on our other bigger traffic channels (220K+ parents and kids retailers)
We’re not doing these things, we’ve never threatened to do anything to damage her business unlike she and her associates (who have insinuated that they can damage our business by leveraging TL’s community), we currently do not intend to do these things unless it is absolutely necessary to defend ourselves.
This claim that the reason we publish our findings to our customers is to damage her business is absurd.
Tiny Land / Alison King has shown ZERO understanding of why companies should disclose any safety concerns for customers and why this due diligence is needed.
3. Alison King continues to claim that we’re benefitting from knowing the ‘secrets’ of her business.
This is more imaginary nonsense. There has been ZERO awareness of the damage she has caused to us so far, but ongoing claim of HER damage.
To make it very clear: ALL of our posts are ENTIRELY based on knowledge that is available to any customer of Tiny Land. We have deliberately NOT used any of our inside knowledge for these articles.
The past performance criticism or the fact it’s not meeting the product volume it claims etc could’ve been written by any TL customer. The issue of the ‘Safe to Eat’ claim being problematic, the health risk of food colouring, the fact that they’re azo dyes. Compliance issues can be observed by anyone who knows the area… etc. Anyone can find this out and raise the same issues we have raised, simply based on what you see on TL products, no insider knowledge is needed to assess these things.
On top of that, as reseller who sells these things, we never received EN71-3/EN71-7 testing doc or safety assessments from TL even though we asked for them. We can say these things. We can say anything about the products we have in inventory as we observe. This has nothing to do with the knowledge of their inner business.
It took us 1 day to do the safety assessment for food colours to find out all the well-known health risks commonly associated with them and the regulations. Another day for compliance and Trading Standards to find out: The fact that it is HIGHLY problematic for a company to make a TOY SAFETY claim for tint/colourants that are not the final coating and sell them to the public. The fact that material for known allergies must be disclosed. The fact that you should never claim ‘Safe to eat’ for non-food products. The fact that Finger Paints and art materials need to be tested for EN71-7. The fact that you should not claim paint/coating/colours that do not biodegrade as Plastic Free etc. i.e.
The ‘secrets’ we know about the business are that she is using a common blog recipe or pure ingredient that has no merit to be special but ‘pretending’ to be proprietary (vinegar dye, pure tung oil etc), she did not conduct adequate safety assessment while claiming the ‘safest for kids’ (we’ve never seen any), she did not understand the regulations and trading standards for making certain claims (weights and measures act, ‘safe to eat’ etc) etc etc.
We have refrained from disclosing any insider information that a customer or normal reseller could not find out.
We have NO NDA obligations but we’ve been respecting her ‘secrets’.
We’re simply forced to disclose ONLY to defend ourselves from her ongoing public accusations.
The damage caused to us so far is adding up non-stop at this point.
4. Claiming we’re doing this to benefit our launch
Alison King claims that this is our ‘strategy’ just before our new launch.
This has nothing to do with our launch, if anything, this is extremely disruptive, time-consuming and damaging to us, when we should be getting on with our launch. Just more damage from being involved with TL and being forced to sell their products against our better judgement to save our loss.
We’ve got enough resources if we ever want to promote our new brand widely. (We work with 2000k+ long term retail partners and a 220k+ social following and a few million total site visits across our multiple business)
We had that same food colour dye in-house 2 years ago, this has been put on hold forever as we’ve got these endless jugs of inventory to get rid of. We’re finally getting on with the new products, which could’ve happened at least a year sooner. Our new products plan has been DELAYED so much due to the misfortune of getting involved with Tiny Land.
The post regarding the safety issue was made AS SOON AS we found out about it. And it is BECAUSE we’ve been selling them. For no other reason. The fact that she, as a business, does not even understand the necessity to disclose these things in public just proves further that she does not understand the obligations of the company towards the customers. Hence no proper safety assessment and due diligence so far.
We absolutely dislike dishonest marketing, also it gives me the creeps to think of a child dipping their hands into this, licking their fingers because no parents were given any caution.
Period.
Lastly,
This ongoing accusations in public & private from Tiny Land, and people throwing ‘abominable’, ‘shameful’ etc. at us is getting tiresome.
This continuous, baseless accusation that we’re trying to steal, what is essentially, a common blog recipe, is ludicrous. We’ve been still ‘shielding’ Tiny Land, voluntarily, and taking all the abuse without telling them more about what happened. However, Tiny Land is really testing our patience.
Tiny Land and its friends have been telling us that we would hear from their lawyers.
We’d MUCH prefer to hear from a lawyer as a rational discussion has been challenging, to say the least.
We had to try really hard to convince her that we’re not trying to steal her recipe last time in private. I have no time to repeat this.
Please ask the lawyer to review all of the material we’ve published, our last legal letter as well as all communications in the past.
To reiterate, this page will not be available to public, but we’ll refer to anyone who makes false accusations against us, acts in a damaging way towards our business to this page. Also when you insinuate/imply in any suggestive way to influence your audience in relation to your past accusations against us in a veiled manner.
[This is currently a draft, I will add all screenshots, images and text records that might be relevant later in foot notes]
Sincerely,