If you’ve been following the launch of Squeaky Clean, you may have noticed that the ingredient list wasn’t there at first. Now it is. And if you’re the type of person who pays attention to that sort of thing, you probably also noticed the contradiction sitting right at the center of it: here’s someone who won’t put a product near their collection without knowing exactly what’s in it, asking you to do exactly that. I see it. I’m not going to excuse it. But I do want to explain it, because some of what I’ve learned about myself through this process has genuinely surprised me.
There are three reasons I was hesitant. All three of them are real. None of them fully justify it. But here they are.
Reason One: Copycats
I have poured two years of my life into Squeaky Clean. Not two years of casual tinkering, two years of staying up until 4 a.m. on a Tuesday, running tests, reading research, reformulating, and then getting up three hours later to go fix garage doors. This product is my baby. It is not a batch of soap somebody whipped together and thought was pretty cool. It is the result of sustained, obsessive, sleep-deprived effort from someone who genuinely cares about what it does.
That kind of work has a very real enemy in this community. If you’ve been around for any length of time, you know exactly the types of copycats I’m talking about: Hongyi. For those who don’t know, Hongyi specializes in custom one-off inflatable toys, bottom-tier vinyl, bottom-tier seams, bottom-tier paint, and rather than developing their own original designs, they steal them. Puffy Paws designs, other artists’ work, lifted wholesale and printed onto the cheapest material they can source. This isn’t paranoia. This isn’t some far-fetched hypothetical. This has been happening in our community for fifteen years, and it is ongoing right now.
So when I think about handing over a complete, readable formula for a product I spent two years building, just because I’m trying to sell it, I think about that. I think about someone copying it, undercutting my price by a dollar, and selling it to the same people I built it for. That was the primary driver. It was the loudest voice in my head when I was deciding what to put on that label.
Reason Two: Ingredients Without Context Is Just Noise
Here’s the truth: most people don’t know what any of these words mean. That’s not an insult, it’s just reality. Unless you’re working with these chemicals regularly, looking at an ingredient list like mine is like reading a foreign language. You might recognize one or two names you’ve seen before, and the rest is just a wall of syllables.
Think about how you buy dish soap. You don’t stand in the aisle comparing sodium lauryl sulfate against Laramine oxide. You grab a brand you trust, you go home, you wash your dishes, and you get on with your life. That is exactly what I’m trying to build with Vinyl Vibe Studio. I want caring for your collection to feel that simple and that normal. Because the alternative, the thing I’ve accidentally done to myself, is not something I’d wish on anyone.
I close my eyes and I see micelles. I see surfactants lifting oils off vinyl surfaces. This is what happens when you go too deep. I am burning myself out. I am losing sleep. I am standing in a room at 4 a.m. under an LED light yelling at a pH meter. That is not a healthy way to live, and it is absolutely not what I want for this community. I want people to love their toys, take care of them, and move on with their lives.
So when I think about releasing an ingredient list with no accompanying context, I think about the person who Googles each ingredient one by one and lands on something alarming without any of the surrounding information that makes it not alarming. Someone who sees one ingredient flagged somewhere online as a potential plasticizer concern, without knowing that the way this formula is built means that concern doesn’t apply. That kind of decontextualized panic doesn’t help my customers. It just creates noise that I then have to fight through.
The customers who have trusted me with their purchases, and I am genuinely honored by that trust, aren’t getting anything useful out of a raw ingredient list. What they’re getting is an information dump with no decoder ring. And the people who do know what they’re looking at? Some of them aren’t there to understand. They’re there to find something they can use.
Reason Three: Targeted Harassment
Since I started Vinyl Vibe Studio, I’ve met some genuinely wonderful people. I’ve made real friends. I’ve shipped products globally and had experiences that have meant a lot to me. But almost immediately, I also started receiving consistent, targeted harassment from a small group of people online.
I’m not going to name names. But I’ll tell you what they’ve done. They have taken private conversations out of context and publicly misrepresented them. They have made false claims about their own expertise without anything to back it up. As one example, this group has publicly recommended that people use a silicone tire shine product to replasticize their toys. It will not replasticize anything. It contains no plasticizer. It may give a toy a temporarily shiny look or a slight slick feeling, but it has no business being framed as a restorative treatment, and my gut would never let that product anywhere near my collection. That kind of advice, handed down with false authority, is exactly the pattern. They haven’t just twisted my words either, they’ve fabricated things entirely. If you’ve followed Vinyl Vibe Studio for a while, you may have some idea of who I’m referring to. I genuinely don’t know the full count, because of how many fake accounts they’ve cycled through.
It has gone far enough that they approached my husband, pretending to be friendly, casual, just making conversation, specifically to extract information about my testing process and business operations. Information he doesn’t have, because this is my business, my passion, and he has his own full life. He’s at his bowling league. He’s at disc golf. We talk about it at home, but this isn’t his thing to know in detail. They went to him anyway, wearing a friendly face, and then took whatever he said and used it to slander me publicly.
I want to be clear about something, because I think it matters for understanding all of this: I have no problem with people challenging the claims I make. I am genuinely happy to share the information and research that led me to those claims. I’m not a polymer scientist. I’m not a chemical engineer. I’m a garage door guy who loves pool toys more than he loves life itself, and someone who has put a serious amount of time, energy, and effort into learning how to protect them. Everything I do is a good faith effort to preserve, protect, and care for the toys I love, and to help others do the same. I will never stop learning, and I will never claim to be perfect.
And honestly? When this person first approached me and claimed to have 25 years of experience directly in PVC and polymer chemical engineering, you know what my response was? “That’s great, you sound like a wonderful resource.” I meant it. I was genuinely excited to connect with someone who had real expertise and shared this passion. That feeling lasted about five more messages before I started to realize something wasn’t adding up.
I want to be fair here, because I think fairness matters even when it’s uncomfortable. I can actually understand, at least partly, where this person is coming from. I’m 30 years old, which isn’t 16, but this person has decades on me. And from what I can see, even through all of it, they do genuinely love their toys. They built their knowledge and their methods in a completely different era, without the research tools and resources that are available now. They spent years sharing what they knew with friends and in community spaces. They were doing the best they could with the information they had.
Then some young plushy comes in and starts telling you that the methods you’ve trusted and shared for decades might actually be doing harm. That is a hard thing to sit with. It’s not just inconvenient, it’s genuinely painful. It feels like potential betrayal of the people you care about and the toys you love. So you go looking for proof that the new guy is wrong, and that search stops being about finding the truth pretty quickly. It becomes about finding peace of mind. It becomes about protecting what you’ve already decided to believe.
I watched that shift happen in real time. The questions started as genuine challenges, and I answered them honestly and thoroughly. When the answers held up, the questions didn’t stop, they just changed shape. The goal posts moved. My answers got ignored. Because they were never actually looking for my answers. They had already answered these questions, in their own minds, before I was born. What they were looking for was a contradiction, and when they couldn’t find one, they just started claiming one existed anyway.
I have no interest in dragging this out or making it bigger than it needs to be. Honestly, every time I get a message from this group, the Styx song “Too Much Time on My Hands” starts playing in my head. But I’d be leaving something important out if I didn’t explain the effect it has had, because it is directly connected to why I made the choices I made around Squeaky Clean.
Since I launched Squeaky Clean, sure enough, the day after release, one of them showed up in my Shopify inbox. They follow me into Telegram group chats. When I get a message from a stranger asking about ingredients, my immediate instinct is to wonder if it’s them.
I want to be honest about what that has done to me, because I think it matters. I am, at my core, a trusting person. I am an open book. I believe in transparency. I want to be the person who assumes good faith. Before all of this, I trusted people until they gave me a reason not to. Now it’s the reverse. I don’t trust strangers unless they give me a reason to. That is a real loss, and it didn’t happen by accident. It was taken from me, piece by piece, through sustained, bad-faith behavior from people who aren’t here to build anything.
They haven’t extinguished what I’m doing with Vinyl Vibe Studio. But they have stolen energy that was meant for this community. Light that was supposed to go somewhere good got consumed by their nonsense. And that’s the cost of letting people like that operate without any accountability.
If it had only been the first two concerns, copycats and context, I think I would have handled this differently. I would have taken the risk on copycats and hoped for the best. I would have trusted that I could educate people through misunderstandings, because I believe in what I’m doing and I know how to explain it. But with this third element in the mix, with people who aren’t engaging in good faith, who sidestep every clarification because they’re not actually interested in accuracy, they’re interested in the gotcha, the calculus changes completely. You can’t educate bad faith out of someone.
So Where Does That Leave Us
Because of regulatory requirements, U.S. law and EU standards, I have disclosed the full ingredient list. That’s happening. It’s not optional, and I’m not fighting it.
What I will do: everything in my power to keep Squeaky Clean in full compliance with United States and European Union regulations. I will share the complete ingredient list, as required.
What I may not always do: share my design philosophy, or give away details that could help any possible copycats hone in on the recipe. Not because I’m hiding something dangerous, I’m not, but because that design philosophy is the thing I’ve spent two years building, and it’s the one part of the castle where I still get to keep some keys.
I know the contradiction I started with is still sitting there. I’m not pretending it isn’t. But now you know where it came from. That feels like the least I could offer.