My pom poms have arrived. I took a leap of faith and hopped onto taobao and put an order through. I wasn’t sure whether it was going to arrive. I know the online stores are generally quite good over in China but I didn’t know how the process would be shipping to Australia. So if you are considering ordering something, then give it a go.
The process can be a little overwhelming but there are a lot of guides online to help you navigate the website. On top of that, with the help of google translate, it at least removes an element of the language barrier. The other barrier that is now removed is the international shipping portion. If you live in certain countries, Australia being one of them, then after you put your order through, the items will be sent to a warehouse, repacked and weighed and shipping charges calculated on the total weight. They now accept credit cards like visa and MasterCard which wasn’t the case last year when I went searching to buy things online. My stumbling block then is not having UnionPay or alipay.
The one big hurdle at least when ordering pom poms is the customisation of the colours. If you’re intending on ordering specific coloured Pom Poms, you’ll need to download a program called AliWangWang where you can communicate directly with the supplier and let them know what you want. The person I ordered off only wrote in Hanzi so you might need to find a friend to help or use google translate to get your point across. And of course you could just send them a picture of what you’re after.
So there you have it, after putting my order in about three weeks ago, it’s finally arrived and I can get on with finishing the lion.
They did a great job packing it to make sure they arrived in Australia without being squashed.
wakeuplion 
Beautiful! Glad to hear it’s getting easier to order custom sets. Hopefully the quality keeps up, though. When it got easier to order whole lions, that started the whole mass-production and lower workmanship thing and we ended up with a lot of inexpensive junk. Would hate to see the materials or quality on such an important piece of the lions go downhill.
The great thing about these sets are you can customise the density of the silk to suit your budget and look. They’ve got normal, 1.5x and 2x the density. You pay for the extra material with $$ though! FYI these were double density so it’ll be interesting to see how sparse the normal ones look.
The shop I ordered from look like they actually make their pom poms for the Chinese opera costumes so if it ticks their boxes, it ticks mine too!