oldauntiny GOs: GH2 transparency report and retrospective

Anyone who has talked to Cassandra and I knows that we have tried to find the right balance between being GOMs and fans. 

GOMing has brought us a lot of joy and fulfillment: we love ATEEZ, and so by extension, we love helping people with their ATEEZ collections. We are proud of the work we’ve done as GOMs both in adding to ATEEZ’s sales and aiding other atinys. 

But here comes the but. 

We have also struggled. The GOM discourse has weighed on us (probably on me more so than Cassandra). Being hated by people on the internet for the large amount of free work we’re doing feels.. bad. It just does. 

Even when the GOM discourse isn’t directed at us, it still weighs on us. This is what people think of the work that we’re doing? These are the assumptions people are making about us? 

I’ve been called out before for speaking on this too. If I say anything, I’m a big whiny baby who has no right to complain because I signed up for this. “You don’t have to host,” they tell me. But that doesn’t mean I can’t point out general unfairness or poor behavior towards GOMs. 

So yeah, there has been a growing sore spot about the general discourse around GOMs that takes away from the overall joy I might otherwise find as a collector and GOM. 

And now we have a new, added stress of The Tariffs (which I’ll get to, but first, I must discuss Ice On My Teeth from our perspective). 

the numbers (all numbers taken from Masterlist)

This comeback, we ordered 3,641 album compared to last year’s 3,798. We had intended to order much less this comeback as we felt last comeback we had taken on too much, but as you can see… lol. 

Over the course of the comeback, we opened for 54 GOs and had 153 joiners. The majority of the work for ordering was done during the months of November and December, corresponding with an already busy time (the holidays). Also during this time, my father was undergoing surgery for the cancer he was diagnosed with around this time last year. Most of my joiners and people who follow me are already aware of this, and I am incredibly grateful for your patience during that time. 

ATEEZ had 22 fancalls that we opened for during Ice On My Teeth promotions. Of those 22 GOs, I applied for 2 fancalls, one with Jongho and one with OT8, both of which I won. We entered Cassandra for one fancall with Mingi, which she also won. 

We used proxy GOMs for 4 of the 22, and all 4 of the GOMs won their fancall attempts. For 1 of the proxy GOMs, it was their first ever fancall. For 1, it was their first ever fancall with the member. The other 2 were large GOMs who offered a steep discount to joiners. 

The rest of the fancalls were raffled off. We held 3 raffles that anyone was able to join. For 1, we gave extra entries to people who showed proof of voting for Jongho for an award, and a person who did vote for Jongho won the raffle and also a fancall with Wooyoung. All 3 of our general raffle winners won their fancall attempts. 

The other 12 fancalls were raffled only to our fixed joiners. Of those 12 attempts, we won 10, which I will detail more in the next section. 

the good

Our greatest success was our fixed chat. We had 32 claims for fixed chat, and we won a fancall for 12 of our 23 fixed joiners.

It was incredibly heartening to see our fixed joiners rallying around their fixed counterparts. Often they would claim extra to help another joiner win, and it really did have the vibe of a close family. Friends helping friends. 

This brought some of the joy back to collecting, and it also became a safe space to talk about the other discourse we were seeing. 

We also reinvented our masterlist, which was both good and bad. It took some time to get used to, but it helped us a lot when it came time to send outs because everyone of our joiners had a page, and we could track what we had sent them over the course of the comeback. 

It also helped in situations where a joiner asked if they would have items in a certain batch because we could look at their page and see every GO they’d ever joined with us. 

I think from that, we learned perhaps a different way we could do it in the future that may accomplish the same thing but make it even easier. We’re all just learning and growing here, so I consider this a success. 

We also had great success with our early access chat. These joiners were reliable and joined often, making it easier to fill sets and making send outs easier. I appreciate all of them so much for their trust and patience, and I was happy to see many of them also be active in our trades and things chat. 

We also held three general raffles, and all of our raffle winners won those fancalls. 

In total, we only lost two fancalls. We lost the unit one for one of our fixed joiners, and we lost one towards the end of the comeback for a fixed joiner when we didn’t open any additional sets outside of fixed. 

the bad

This comeback, for our fixed group, we allowed them to create what we called “slush funds”. They would send me large chunks of money in advance, and then I would basically keep track of it. We set this up because in past comebacks, I had ended up covering huge amounts of PCs due to people not paying on time. 

It’s easy to say “well if people don’t pay on time just don’t order for them”, but that puts everyone else’s order at risk. I will not punish the many because a few weren’t able to send a payment on time. And other people have lives, stress, families outside of sending me money for GOs. I understand this. I genuinely don’t hold it against them if they send the payment after I order. 

Additionally, I am a person with high anxiety and am pretty risk averse, so I will often order early to ensure the kaddy sees it and the items don’t run out (think of all the times GOMs have missed a toktoq drop because it sold out). So sometimes, it’s not even that they’re sending me the money late. Sometimes it’s that I got nervous and felt I had to make the purchase early. 

ATEEZ also drops a ridiculous amount of POBs before the comeback and in the 2-3 weeks after. Since we host for everything, that means people would need to send me money almost every day. It’s easier for them to send a large chunk and just let me spend it. And like I said, in many ways, it’s easier for my bank account. 

However, there was a point in this comeback where accounting became my full time job. I needed to “reconcile” the books every couple of days, which took a lot of time because I’m not an accountant, and I was just basically making up the process of doing it as I went. Would there have been an easier, more systematic way to do this sort of accounting? Maybe. But I didn’t know it. 

So, while a good idea in theory, this became unsustainable.  

And also, we circle back around to fancalls. Because most of the people in our fixed chat became our friends, we wanted them to win their fancall attempts. This meant that we opened more than we were strictly comfortable opening because we wanted to give them the best shot at success. 

There’s really no way for me to balance that. As long as people care about winning fancalls, I care about helping them win. 

This left us, once again, in a position of having much larger GOs than we wanted to have, which made our shipping and sorting times longer as well. It’s simply unsustainable to host large GO after large GO, no matter the intentions with which we host them. 

the ugly

Sometime in November, Makestar reached out to me about testing their new kaddy service, called Album Buddy. They did several interviews with me about what I wanted to see in a kaddy, and quite frankly, I was very impressed. 

They seemed to really care about what GOMs needed. The developer asked me, “what can I do to make you use this service.” I told him that I needed it to give me what my current Kaddy was giving me, plus I needed it to be cheaper. A couple of days later, they sent a message saying they had figured out a way to make it cheaper (basically bypassing the PayPal G&S fee that I have to pay for Jungbox). 

Our GOs have long been slightly more expensive than other GOMs because Jungboxkr doesn’t take Wise, which has a much better conversion rate. This means we pay PayPal’s conversion fee + a goods and services fee each time we order from Jungboxkr. They also charge a lot for their inclusion service which makes our EMS higher, and since their recycling fee for albums is the same as their inclusion fee (almost $1.25 per album) we almost always have to get the inclusions sent to us. 

So I decided to give Album Buddy a try. Which turned out to be an incredibly stressful headache for reasons I will detail. 

(By the way, this is not to say that no one should use Album Buddy. They are very user friendly, but they do not have the resources or systems in place for a GOM who is working with a large volume. I understand that they are hiring more people and intend to make the process better, but at the time I used them, their service did not work for my needs. However, their customer service is great, and they are very responsive.) 

Album Buddy as an ordering system is incredibly well designed. They allow you to order from other stores directly on the Album Buddy website, and pay your money through the website. They take care of the rest, and there was not a single time where I had an issue with ordering. It was way easier and more enjoyable to order from them than it was Jungboxkr. 

So, I used album buddy for every website where I could not order for myself from the months of December to January. For websites where I was able to place the order myself, I had the items sent to my address at Jungboxkr. 

Everything was fine. 

Until items started shipping. 

Album Buddy simply didn’t have the ability to open packages and send unboxing information within the 7 days required by Korean law for product issues. For the record, I have never had that issue with Jungboxkr. Even at the height of an ATEEZ comeback when Jungboxkr is swamped, it has never taken them more than 5 days to show me what is in the box that arrived. This is incredibly important because if you don’t make a claim within 7 days of a box arriving, the company does not have to fix it. 

I have rarely had an issue with claims from a store. I think in all my times ordering, I’ve had 6 orders messed up. Three of them were from toktoq, 2 from KQ (which is basically also toktoq), and 1 from Fromm. So it’s not like it was incredibly likely that I would need to make a claim on any of these boxes, but it was stressful to know that if I wanted to, I couldn’t. 

The worst part was my Seasons Greetings order from KQ. It took them almost 3 weeks to log this order. KQ, unfortunately, is a company where a claim is very likely going to be needed. In this case, all of my seasons greetings did arrive, but they were not sent evenly. Truthfully, it’s possible KQ wouldn’t have fixed this anyways, but also I wasn’t given a chance to find out because of the delay in unboxing. It also created issues with trades because by the time I was able to find out what I had, most people had already traded for what they needed. 

Despite keeping any eye out for the cards I need, I have not been able to find any trades. 

Due to the Seasons Greetings order being severely delayed, I could not get anything from Album Buddy sent to me until the beginning of February. Once I requested the box be sent, I waited for almost two weeks to hear anything. Finally, they contacted me and requested that I resubmit my order because the items I had chosen wouldn’t fit in one box. So I needed to resubmit it as two boxes. 

This was, and is, crazy to me. How was I to conceptualize how many items I had never seen would fit in a box size I had never seen? 

When I request a box from Jungbox, I ask them to fit as much as they can in their biggest box, starting with the oldest items on hand. They’ve been able to do it successfully every single time. 

This album buddy message came to me when I was out of town, so there was nothing I could do about it for a couple of days. Once I was able, I went back into album buddy’s very awful and not user friendly shipping request system (it’s as if the designer of this part of the system is different from the designer of the purchasing system—or alternatively, they have never needed to ship things to themselves from a different country) and tried to break the request into two different requests so I could get two different boxes containing all of my seasons greetings so I could finally get them to joiners. 

And you know what they did? After another week or so of waiting, they quoted me for 3 boxes. They decided to break one of my requested boxes into two boxes anyways. So none of my boxes were packaged for shipping efficiency because I had 2 large boxes and one smaller box from the items that wouldn’t fit in the other box. This amounted to an almost $1,000 bill which was way higher than it reasonably should have been based on what I was getting. It didn’t even have inclusions in it! 

But I was done. I paid it and waited for said box to arrive. 

It was at this point that I realized I had no way to see what was in those boxes. All of the items had disappeared from album buddy’s website. There was no way for me to confirm what was being sent because there was absolutely no record of what I had ordered. It was all just gone. 

With Jungboxkr, I have a record of every single package I receive in WhatsApp that is sorted by the tracking numbers. I can search a tracking number in the app and see a picture breakdown of the items in the package. Then, when a box is sent to me, they list every single tracking number that is included in the box. Each tracking number is THEN PUT ON THE ITEMS IN THE BOX. I can check the items I receive against the pictures in WhatsApp with a simple search. It’s so easy. It’s beautiful. (Jungboxkr, I didn’t appreciate you enough. I’m ready to send your employees coffee and flowers and my eternal love.) 

Relatedly, I literally couldn’t hate album buddy’s unboxing videos anymore. What I want is a picture of my items so I can see them. I literally do not care about the unboxing video unless there is an issue with the order. In album buddy’s system, I had to watch a 10-15 minute video almost every time I got a box to see what items were in the box. There was no way to skip forward or pause, so I just had to sit there and stare at my computer while watching someone unbox something. Given the amount of items that I order, do you know how much time this took?

I understand that album buddy is their own thing, doing things their own way. But since they’re offering me a service that I am paying for, it is hard not to compare them to the other kaddy service that I pay for. When Jungboxkr opens my box, they send me a single picture (sometimes two if the box is very large) that has all of my POBs laid out in a way I can see them easily. This is a free service. I pay nothing for it, and I can easily save the picture to my phone (but I don’t even have to because it is part of my WhatsApp history). IF there is an issue with the box, Jungboxkr is usually the one to alert me! They will say “this box is missing a POB, here is the unboxing video”, and then I am able to use the unboxing video to make a claim. If they ordered the items for me, they just send me a message that’s like “this box was missing the POB and we’ve sent the claim to the store.” I’ve never paid extra for either of these services, which I mention only because one of the points album buddy tried to sell me on to get me to join with them was that they always send free unboxing videos. Well, my response to that is other services do too, and they do it better. 

I will say that my items from album buddy arrived incredibly quickly once I paid for shipping. They were at my doorstep in Texas the very next day. But that’s basically where the good news ends. 

When we opened the box, they’d barely used any bubble wrap. POBs had spilled out of plastic bags, and were just sort of floating loosely in the box (and yes, we have an unboxing video). They’d also put the original shipping boxes inside of my large box, which goes back to the inefficiency of their packaging for shipping. They added needless extra weight and took up needless extra space in that box because they didn’t want to remove the items and rewrap them in a way that made sense with bubble wrap. 

And as I already mentioned, I had no way to check that the items that arrived in this box were what I requested they send me. They included no packing order, and the items had completely disappeared from the website. To this day, I do not know. I will find out if I’ve got it all once it’s all sorted, I guess. 

But even if there had been some packing sheet, there was no way to tell what order was from what. Nothing was marked. It was just 15 or so orders all placed haphazardly in a box and mixed together. 

Again, Jungbox keeps a chain of custody from their warehouse to my house by using the tracking numbers for each order. When I open a box from Jungbox, I know exactly what package an item came in because it’s marked on the item. 

Album Buddy was absolute chaos. A free for all. 

And again, if you’re ordering on a much smaller scale than we were, maybe that is fine. But with the amount of items we had? No. 

I do acknowledge that I was part of a beta test. And I also understand that they have attempted to fix some of the issues I’ve complained about here. But I will no longer use them as my experience was bad. And while what I get from Jungboxkr may cost me a little more, that price is just worth it to me.

the unknown (aka the tariffs)

Being a GOM has always come with some amount of stress. We are responsible for the shipping logistics of literally thousands of albums into the United States. 

And though it may appear to be, it’s not as easy as just telling a kaddy to put all your items in a box and send it your way. If your box contains a value of over $800, you can get charged customs. This means that I have always packaged my boxes carefully to ensure they are not over the $800 limit and that we are shipping enough items to make it cost effective for joiners. It’s a balance. It requires thought and effort, but I have successfully relied on this $800 limit. 

Right now, things are up in the air. 

Last week, Trump placed a 25% tariff on imports from South Korea. The under $800 exception (called de minimus) still applied, so technically nothing for us needed to change. 

However, once again, it’s not that simple. De minimus was removed for items coming from China, and that’s scary. Even though we’re not ordering things from China while we’re GOMing, it’s concerning to think that this is something that could be used as a trade war tactic at any time. 

Additionally, a couple of days ago, Trump announced that he would put a freeze on the 25% tariff from South Korea for 90 days while the two countries negotiated an agreement. 

We have no idea what will happen in the next 90 days. Maybe South Korea will side with China and the tariff will return along with removing de minimus. Maybe all trade from South Korea will be free and open forever. We literally don’t know. We don’t know what could happen, and that’s pretty scary when you regularly order almost $40,000 worth of merch from South Korea over the period of a couple of months. 

Trump is volatile. Unpredictable. The things we have come to rely on—there’s just no guarantee they will continue to be there, and that goes a lot deeper than our kpop merch. But of course, in this case, it also affects our kpop merch. 

The worst part is that while we don’t know, neither do the shipping companies. One GOM claims she received a $50 tariff bill for a box that had $45 worth of items. I’ve also seen a company state they received a bill FIVE WEEKS after their items arrived from Paris. From Paris. It’s all very confusing but basically my understanding is that the items from Paris were originally from China and marked as being made in China on the report. Thus, UPS charged them a $1,200 tariff. 

Additionally, the timeline shows that this tariff was applied sometime in February, which.. this tariff shouldn’t have existed then. I can see it and be like… that’s not right. But they really were charged that amount, so I’m not even sure it matters if it was right? What’s their recourse? Get ahold of the shipping company? Try to fight it? I’ve done that before, and while it did lower my bill $100, it was stressful, time consuming, and difficult. It’s certainly not a sustainable practice for every package. 

I think it’s worrisome that shipping companies may be covering their ass by just charging whatever because they also don’t know. 

Truthfully, we were already anticipating cutting back. We had told our fixed chat that we would be cutting one set, and that we would no longer concern ourselves with fancalls. We would not be opening outside of fixed, and we would only be ordering the set 24 for the announced drop. 

But in light of the continued unknowns with regard to shipping, tariffs, and surprise charges, the benefits can no longer necessarily outweigh the stress. 

the future

So what do we do as a community? There will be big GOMs who continue to host. They will do it carefully, and they will be responsible with your money, and if you can find one, that’s great. But do not be surprised if you get an additional surprise charge after EMS. Or even after your items have been sent to you. Please be patient with them, and please help your GOMs pay these bills. We just don’t know what’s going to happen. And when. 

There will also be bad GOMs who don’t read the rules and don’t know anything about the logistics and open just because they think it’ll be easy—or a way to get a fancall. They will cause you headaches, time, and money. And the likely result is that they will be unable to get your items to you. 

My suggestion for people is to start ordering in smaller groups. The true issue is one person having legal liability for $40,000 worth of items in South Korea. 

What we plan to do for our GOs is to make a GOM collective. We will have 3 local GOMs who will be responsible for their own ordering and shipping to the U.S. Each GOM (myself, Cassandra, and Jessica) will order their own OT8 set to disburse between our fixed group. This way we can keep much of our fixed group in place. Because we are all local, we will still do all of the sorting and packaging together. The GOM will still be oldauntiny, it’s just that several people will be taking the responsibility of placing those orders. 

This will enable us to keep our individual legal liability down in case of disaster. Because while we have faith that our joiners would help us, legally, it is us and our families that who will be targeted by the government if they find issue with our orders. 

I would suggest going forward that other people break into small groups too. Find people who collect each of the members and order your own OT8 sets to split amongst yourself. 

You may still have to pay tariffs, but this will spread out the liability to more people as opposed to putting it all on one GOMs shoulders. The sheer amount of merchandise any one person gets will be lowered. 

An additional, but also nice side effect in my opinion, is that we won’t have GOMs with huge orders winning all the fancalls. If every individual person is ordering less, it levels the playing field for fancalls. Instead of 3 GOMs ordering 200 albums each, we could have 2 GOMs order in the 50s, and and 10 GOMs order 10 albums each (obviously that math is not ateez math, but more of an example of how it can level the playing field for more people). It will make ordering to win a fancall more accessible because you’re not only competing with huge GOMs holding fancall raffles. 

This is not to say we won’t ever host again or not host at all this next comeback in the future. But for us, we will be taking a pause on ordering to see what (if any) impact the trade war has on GOMs. 

While this 90 days is in effect, we have no idea how anything will play out. If an agreement comes to pass, at least we would have some reassurance that things may not change overnight while we literally have boxes in the air. (And honestly, it’s only some reassurance because Trump could change his mind at any time. But at least it would be something.)

We also don’t know when the next ATEEZ comeback will be. It could be announced tomorrow. It could be announced after their concerts well after the 90 days is over (unlikely). 

The thing is, we know people want a plan. We know people want to have their claims secured and know the GOM will get their items. In this climate, we simply can’t continue to open in the ways that we have. We wish that we could. This has been incredibly hard on us. We’ve been GOMs for so long, and we love this community.

the hope

Neither Cassandra or I want to leave our joiners in a lurch. We want to help you get your items. We want to suppprt baby GOMs. We want to make ATEEZ merchandise accessible to everyone, not least of all because we love ATEEZ and want them to be the biggest group in the world. 

We are working on developing a GOM patreon where we would offer advice, connect people, post instructions, review different kaddy services, etc. This would be a free patreon. Anyone who joined it could access the materials, though we would ask that they not be shared outside of the Patreon (as all anyone has to do is come and join to get it themselves). 

We can also help these small collectives I suggested earlier to form through this. We can use it as a place to connect people with other collectors. 

This will be a place where we have a lot of control due to how Patreon works, so we will be able to make sure that the conversations stay respectful and helpful. 

We hope to have this site up in the next couple of weeks, and we will let you know more when it’s available. If you have any suggestions of things you’d like to see, please let us know!