I Bought Some Off-Brand Geeky Stuff From Teemu (And Wasn’t Mad About It)

So, I ordered some fun stuff from popular shopping app Teemu. Here’s how it went down.

Me: Sweetheart, have you ever bought anything from Teemu? I am thinking of getting it. (I showed him a screenshot of an outtime license plate from Back to the Future.)

His: No, but my friends have, and they say it’s like another AliExpress…

His: Ever heard of a site called ZDNET? He did an article on this.

His: I’m emailing you “Is Teemu Legit? What to Know About This Wildly Popular Shopping App” by Jada Jones.

My wife was very happy with herself. Jada’s article gave me enough confidence to place an order with a company that was spamming ads, but I didn’t have any personal experience.

The Outtime license plate was a cool $3.98 and having loved Back to the Future for a long time, I thought it would be perfect on top of my laser printer at the Fab Lab. I also decided to buy ECTO-1 plates from Ghostbusters.

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Even though these items were coming all the way from China to the US, shipping was free if I was willing to wait a while. But then I ran into a snag. My order was $7.96 and Teemu’s minimum order was $20. it was No Clear anywhere on the site before leaving my credit card points.

But what the hell? Fanboi license plates, if they didn’t suck, were a pretty good deal. I just looked around for something else.

What I got was a Lego kit for the WALL E robot from the Pixar movie of the same name. didn’t except the kit i got official lego kitWho now retails on amazon for $390 more was $59.99 before being “retired” from Lego’s product line. the one i got on teemu was $22.48 naïve from an unnamed company.

order

Nevertheless, I went ahead and ordered. i used a confidentiality card because I didn’t want to give points to a random company that constantly spammed my Facebook page.

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I didn’t have long to wait. About 10 days after I placed my order, Teemu’s package showed up. It was a bit worse for wear as it was a soft envelope with no padding.

To be honest, I was worried that when I opened the envelope I found bent plates and broken fake Lego pieces. I was very relieved to see them all in good condition.

license plates

As you can see below, plates Arrived in fine condition.

They are both made of mild steel. Magnets stick to them, so I know they are iron. The letters are not embossed or stamped, but appear to be silk screened. Still, for my decorative purposes, they’re fine. Here is the one I had hanging above my laser printer in the fab lab.

I haven’t decided yet where the ECTO-1 plate will end up.

fake lego robot

Then there was the fake Lego robot. I didn’t expect much from this, especially since the product was removed from TEMU before it even got here.

The kit came in a plastic bag with other plastic bags filled with parts. No parts were damaged, however there was no connection between how the parts were assembled and the instructions.

Speaking of instructions, it’s been a long time since I’ve built a Lego kit, but the full-color instruction book was just as thorough and helpful as the old instruction books produced by Lego. interesting, Lego is ending printed instructionsWhich I personally find a bit disappointing.

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I’m not going to speculate about the level of piracy or lack of licensing associated with the knock-offs I bought, but as you can see, both the bricks and the booklet look very similar to normal Lego.

It took longer than I remember to make this thing. All the bricks have to be put together like Lego. The build time had little to do with the clone factor, and much more to do with how long it took to find the right parts for the next step.

Kids are generally considered impatient, but if they can put together Lego (or a Lego-like kit), they must have the patience of a saint. I don’t know how people can be so patient. By the time I was done, I had pulled out my entire library of well respected programmer profanity and ripped it up. But again, it’s not the dip kit’s fault, but hundreds of tiny little parts with even tiny studs through it.

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I had a solid complaint. At the very end of the project, I found that some parts were missing. These were important in a way to complete the model. Since Teemu discontinued the product right after I ordered it, I had no hope of getting the parts I was missing. So I put on my engineer hat (not the choo-choo one, but the maker one) and redesigned a part of the robot in such a way that I could free up the parts from the previous modules and implement them in the final stages .

And here’s what I ended up with:

I think it turned out great.

Bottom-line

Let’s be clear. My experience with Teemu is limited to just this one sequence of three items. I haven’t tried to return anything or get my money back yet.

But, with that caveat, I really have very few complaints. The products arrived in good condition despite their worrying packaging. The license plates were exactly what I wanted, and hey, for less than four bucks each, what’s there to complain about?

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The kit was missing some parts, but it was well documented and the bricks themselves were indistinguishable in quality from official Lego parts. I was a little concerned that the product had been discontinued before it even arrived, but I still found a cute little yellow robot to put on my shelf.

I can’t advise you whether to order from Temu or not. But I will tell you that if I find something else that I want and it looks like good enough value, I will try them again. My first experience certainly didn’t go to waste.

How are you? Have you ordered from Teemu? Do you think you can? Let us know in the comments below.

You can follow my day to day project updates on social media. be sure to follow me on twitter @DavidGewirtzOn Facebook Facebook.com/DavidGewirtzon instagram Instagram.com/DavidGewirtzand on youtube YouTube.com/DavidGewirtzTV,