Zoya

I feel like this post has been long overdue, but after last night's events and drama... I feel now is the right time to do this review. For those of you who may have no clue what I'm talking about, I believe Lena @ Lena Loves Nails did a pretty good job of summarizing the events. (Lena is awesome, so you should check out her page, anyway! ;) )

Until a few months ago, I had never heard of Zoya. Their products are still relatively new to me. I believe I own 9 of their polishes: Cynthia, Holly, the Pinterest minis, Opal, Carly, Arizona and Rory. Overall, I have been very happy with the colors. What I have not been happy with is the quality or the price. Most recently, I've tried out Cynthia, Holly and Carly. As I've said, I've been very happy with the colors: Cynthia is one of my favorite polishes at least color wise. I had problems with Holly and Carly not wanting to dry; I don't know if it was just the weather. That very well could be a possibility. I do plan on trying them again.

Here is a description of Art of Beauty, who manage Zoya.com: "You will find Art of Beauty brands in the world’s best salons, spas and resorts; not in discount stores." This right here is why I have a problem with Zoya. I have been much happier with some of my drug store, discount store brands than with Zoya so far. My Sally Hansen polish, for example, typically does not chip as quickly as my Zoya polishes have so far and they are typically half the price or less. Yes, they cover well but if they're going to chip quickly, then what's the difference?

I do own one other Zoya product: Hot Lips in Luck. I don't own any other Hot Lips but I really wasn't crazy about the texture of Luck when I got it, and I'm still not. Once again, I have cheaper brands (Wet 'n' Wild specifically) which so far I am much happier with.

In short, I'm starting to feel like Zoya is pretty much all hype and the quality of their products aren't worth their cost. They offer lots of great promotions which look fantastic at first: spend $10 and get America for free and free shipping! (just an example!) What's wrong with this promotion? Well, first of all... the price. Ten dollars. If you look around Zoya's site, their polish is typically $8. A good chunk of their products are under $8. In other words, they chose this amount so you will buy more from them. Incidentally, if I really wanted America, I could pretty much just use this month's Share the Love program points 3 polishes for $10 and get the same deal so what's the difference? If I were to go with either of these approaches and get the 3 polishes, I would still end up paying about $16 (a little more with the Share the Love points due to shipping.)

This looks like a great deal at first, it really does... but I have to ask: is the quality of the polish worth that? I'm feeling really torn, I really am... I love the colors Zoya offers, but my past few experiences haven't been good at all when it comes to the polishes chipping. I have not been happy.

Take into consideration, I've been feeling like this for a few weeks now, feeling disappointed and let down with my Zoyas (aside from Opal and Cynthia... chipping and all, these two are awesome!)

Now, enter the drama from last night. A little bit of background information on myself before I continue:
Between my degree in Interactive Media and my numerous majors, including Computer Science and Web Development, I have over 8 years of schooling in the development of Web pages, marketing, and everything involved. I have been publishing content in one form or the other to the WWW for over 13 years. I have VERY high expectations of professional Web sites. I also have the unique prospective of knowing just how incredibly difficult it is to debug programs. It can take hours or days (or years, in the extreme cases of programming something as complicated as Microsoft Windows, for example.) Often times, a very simple error can cause big problems and it can also be the very simplest mistakes which may be hard to debug. It isn't easy.

With all of that in mind.... how Zoya handled their most recent error, I feel, is just absolutely unacceptable. I understand it was a holiday, so they may not have had people working all night making sure things were running smoothly. I find it absolutely ridiculous and unprofessional that they launched the promotion code out to the public, and then didn't follow up to ensure everything was running smoothly until what.. 12 hours later? I don't really know how long it actually was, but I do know I was awake all night last night and people were still claiming their "free" Zoya until about 8 AM my time when the servers went down. That's a very long time to have a glitch go uncorrected. I expected it to go on for maybe 2 hours before they noticed and did something about it. Now I will give them a little bit of leeway: I don't know what all is involved in their systems, so I don't know if it's in house or not. Perhaps they outsource, so there may not have been much they could have done about it. I just don't know.

Their followup is just unbelievable. I honestly cannot believe they cancelled all of those orders without sending an e-mail alerting us of the problem and why they did so. I wonder how many people are still expecting free polish because they haven't checked Facebook. Just very unprofessional.

That being said, I do understand why they cancelled the orders, I really do. I wasn't really expecting them to process anyway. I'm just not happy in the least with how they handled this. I strongly believe they should have launched the promotion, and been there watching things and keeping an eye on it the entire time to make certain everything went smoothly. I will say, if they were aware of the problem earlier on than I realize, they definitely didn't handle it well.

I know some of you are going to disagree with me, and that's fine. That's why I love America. This is simply my opinion :)

For now, I have no plans to purchase any of Zoya's products in the near future. If Copious is ever nice enough to give us more free credits, I might consider it but odds are I'm probably going to look into buying some other brands first. There are so many different brands out there which I haven't tried, I really don't want to get tied down to just one.

Thanks for reading and I hope you continue to support me. New giveaways post coming up shortly!