Cuddly Octopus Update – July 2017

Greetings!

Let’s start this month off with the bit of bad news before we get into all the fun stuff. If you visited our site in the last three weeks, you probably noticed the message that our PayPal account was terminated. There’s not much else I can say about this because we, too, know very little about the reason why. All we know is that our funds were frozen, PayPal stated they would never work with us again, and we were given no chance at appeal. Fantastic! In order to return to processing orders as quickly as possible, we implemented a temporary payment method with the folks over at Stripe. However, since Stripe’s policy includes a blanket ban of all adult goods, we made the decision to hide the R-18 products from our website.

We are still working hard to find some solution to the payment method crisis though. There’s no need for me to bore you all with the details, but the short of it is that any store that sells adult products is considered to be “high-risk” by the financial world. Thus, essentially all of the common payment processors include blanket bans of merchants who sell these kinds of products. While there are several payment processors that accept adult goods, they (a) typically have a long-ish approval process and (b) have subtantially higher processing fees than the normal guys. Unfortunately, this means that if and when we find a new payment processor, there is a non-trivial chance that we will need to increase the prices of our products marginally (~$5) in order to make up for the increase in our fees. We want to appologize ahead of time if we have to do this, and hope you understand.

Onto the good news…

This month we are updating our website with the following 7 designs:

Disclaimer: The lines and octopodes on the sample images are a watermark and won’t be on the printed cover.

You can purchase these and all of our past designs from our storefront here!

This month, we’ve also decided to begin offering an easy and convenient way to order our designs in either a 160cm or 150cm flavor. Just select your desired length when adding the product to your cart. This option is not available for all covers, most covers after Saber Nero, and a select few preceding it, were drawn in such a way that allows us to crop them to 150cm without losing a substantial amount of the top and bottom. However, all future products should have no problem going between 160cm and 150cm.

Additionally, the premium P80 2-Way Roika versions of most of our new character designs from this month, including our old Hanekawa Tsubasa and Mystia Lorelei designs, will be available for pre-order on Sakura-Palace. As an added bonus, we’ve heard your request for P80 All Ages covers and beginning in this month we are running a trial of offering both the All Ages variant and R-18 variant for select covers (Elf, Shimakaze & Amatsukaze, and Tsukihi Araragi). Depending on how well these All Ages variants sell over there, we may expand or contract our All Ages offerings on Sakura-Palace.

As per usual, we have a lot of projects upcoming that we hope you’ll enjoy. Currently, we can announce the following artists are working on these projects:

Additionally, we have a few unannounced projects as well we’re hoping you will enjoy.

Oh, and while it may not impact many of you here, Cuddly Octopus will have a presence at a few anime conventions in Taiwan and Hong Kong over the next few months where we’ll be selling a few of our covers and some tapestries of select designs. If you’re planning on attending any of these, be on the lookout for our partners manning the Cuddly Octopus booth!

As always, thanks for your continued support of Cuddly Octopus.

– The Cuddly Octopus Team