Many of you know that last year Jen and I got married. During the planning for that event I saw and add in the weekly circular of our sunday paper that caught my eye. I've actually saved it all this time, and scanned it so you could see what I'm talking about:

It was around June/06 when I saw that, and I thought to myself "wow, what a great idea, Jen will be really excited about these for the wedding". It really stuck me as an idea whose time had come, I mean being able to print any message on an M&M and make it look all custom and slick like that, who couldn't get excited about it when planning a big event that was a pivotal moment in their life? Plus it had the benefit of being somewhat modern and not the same old same old that everyone expected. You wouldn't believe how hard it is to want to be cutting edge in a market full of paper confetti.

After talking it over we were both excited about them, and thought they would be really cool to do. So we headed over to the M&M site and started seeing what we could fit on them. Here's a screen capture of what we ended up with, taken directly from the M&M site:

A few weeks later they arrived, I believe we ended up paying around eighty dollars for 7 8oz bags of them (and that was with a coupon for free shipping). They arrived well packed, in a neat Styrofoam container, with an acceptable amount of broken one's in there. The only problem I really have is with the print quality. Honestly, I think it's horrible and looks more like somebody did it with a dot matrix printer. I think that way because of the expectations created by their ads and their website. If you look at both of them, the text is clear, crisp, exactly what you would expect a high end custom quality product to be, what we ended up with however was not reflected in their advertising:

Of course we kept them and used them, they were still a great idea I think. My real issue is that they look nothing like what we expected to receive at all. So out of curiosity I emailed M&M asking if perhaps our batch was under par or if this was the level of quality to expect, and if so then why does their website not reflect that or their ads?

This was the response I received:

Thank you for your email.

The quality of print should be clear as you would expect when placing your order. However there are times when the machine in which they print might have a glitch or not print in the quality it should. If you were to ever receive any candy with faint or non legible text please feel free to contact us here in our customer service department. We can be reached at 1-888-696-6788. If you were to ever receive an order as so, we would reship the order out to at no cost.

Have a great day!

Your friends at MYM&M’S

Of course that doesn't really address any concerns I might have about whether or not the print quality in my batch was poor or not. And I don't see how calling them up is going to help, for some reason I don't think holding the m&m up to the phone will work.

So I guess take this as friendly advise, if you've ordered custom M&M's that look like poop, call them and they'll redo your order. Taking a look at google, if mine had come out like these we wouldn't have probably been disappointed in them a bit. Either way, there are so few pictures of them on the internet, I figured this would be a good reference for somebody looking to purchase them.