Independent Artist Vandul Speaks Out Against Corporate Deceit

This past Sunday, vinyl toy designer and independent artist Vandul took to Instagram to speak out.

He’d worked with Clutter, a company well known in the art toy world for its long-standing partnership with Kidrobot. What he described was a pattern of exploitation that will be painfully familiar to many artists.

Vandul’s story isn’t an exception, it’s the industry standard. Help us change that by supporting artists directly.

In an Instagram post Vandul shares that Clutter convinced him into signing a contract with a “right of first refusal” clause, locking him out of his own creative future. Vandul says they lied to him about royalties. They refused to let him mass-produce his own work. They blocked him from collaborating on apparel made under his own name. In the artists own words, “They claimed ownership over my designs and did nothing with them.”

At the end of the post, Vandul said what so many artists know but few get the chance to say publically. “None of these people actually care about the artists. They look at all of us as cattle.”

These companies wouldn’t exist without artists. The designs, the characters, the culture - it all starts with a person and their vision. And yet at too many companies, artists are treated as a resource to be extracted from, not a partner to be respected.

Vandul’s story isn’t an exception, it’s the industry standard. We started Local Legend Labs because we’d seen enough of this. Artist equity isn’t a tagline for us, it’s the reason we exist. From day one, we built our model around one simple belief: the artist should be in control.

Here’s what that looks like in practice:

• Artists set the price of their own products
• Artists retain full creative control over their designs
• Artists receive 50% of the profits from every purchase
• Artists own their story

If you’re an artist who’s been told your work belongs to someone else, or a collector who wants to support a model that actually puts artists first, we’d love to have you in our corner.

Welcome to Local Legend Labs.

For the artists.