This week I got burned twice. Two separate online shops. Two Websites that gave every indication that the products were made in the USA. Both showed up from China.

If you are familiar with my business, you know I’m hunting for gifts that are sustainable, fair trade, and sweatshop-free. I look at company websites, read all the FAQs,  check out the stories, and find their location. That’s been my baseline. Turns out that my baseline has cracks.

One of the items was a pottery herb stripper. The website had videos of an American potter shaping clay. The text said “I made this” with an American name. There was even a photo of the maker’s mark. What arrived at my door? A ceramic herb stripper with completely different clay, an inferior glaze, and no maker’s mark. The company offered me twenty percent back if I kept it the lousy thing or a full refund if I mailed it all the way back to China. I sent it back. Shipping cost me half the price of the item, but I’m not letting them keep a penny. I have photos. Receipts. Tracking. They’ll probably refuse the return because they have to pay fees on their end. I’ll give it twenty-four days. Then I dispute the charge.

While I was taping the box shut, I kept asking myself how these items slipped past my scrutiny. I’m supposed to be good at this. It’s what I do. But these two fooled me because I didn’t take the final two steps. I didn’t check the Better Business Bureau. I didn’t check Reddit. If I had done either, I’d have walked away.

Here’s the broader truth. Most people do not have the bandwidth to untangle this kind of nonsense. No normal shopper is digging into supply chains or cross-checking addresses. No one is reading between the lines of “handcrafted” when the package is clearly stamped Shenzhen. And that gap between the story and the reality is precisely where these unscrupulous companies thrive. They count on the fact that you won’t look too close. They count on the product being a pain in the but to return.

This is why my work matters. This is why I vet every gift before it makes it into the quiz or the guides. Not because I’m perfect, but because I’m obsessive enough to keep pushing until I understand who made a thing, where they made it, and under what conditions. Going forward, I’ll eventually buy every product I recommend. But as a bootstrapped startup, I just can’t afford that yet. For now, the research needs to be tighter. BBB and Reddit are now standard checks. Any brand pretending to be USA, EU, UK, Canada, Australia, or New Zealand when it’s not is out. Any Asian source without bona fide fair trade and fair labor certifications is out—I will be checking.

Here’s the empowerment part. You deserve gifts you don’t have to second-guess. You deserve honesty without detective work. You deserve companies that say what they are and are what they say.

So I’ll keep digging. I’ll keep vetting. I’ll keep weeding out the impostors so you don’t have to.

If you’ve been burned by a fake “artisan” brand lately, come tell me. We’ll compare notes and keep each other sharp.