I Guess the Postal Service Isn't Ready to Gamble

Last Monday I had a fantastic order in the puppytoes.net store - three boxes of poker night invitations and two sheets of custom postage. I was thrilled because I seemed to be the only one who thought that poker night invitations and matching custom postage was an awesome idea. I'm wierd like that, I like adding little details (like custom postage) to make things special. I'm glad someone else thought it was a good idea, too.

Anyway, so I was psyched also because this was the first time any of my custom postage sold.

I've been checking the store's order report daily to make sure the orders are moving along and I noticed that part of the order shipped to the customer while the custom postage was stuck in production. It was stuck in production since September 4! That's insane! If I was the customer, I'd be pretty pissed.

I emailed the support group at Cafepress, and today I got a response that the partner producing the postage (name omitted so as not to damage their reputation, as per the usage guidelines) rejected my image because of their content restrictions, meaning I can't use:

an image that's obscene, offensive, blasphemous, pornographic, sexually agressive, deceptive, threatening, menacing, abusive, harmful, and invasion of privacy, supportive of unlawful action, defamatory, libelous, vulgar, violent, or otherwise objectionable; no material that depicts a celebrity or their likeness, no leaders or politicians, current or former world leaders, convicted criminals, newsworthy, notorious or infamous images and individuals, or any material that is vintage in appearance or depicts images from an older era; copyrighted images, trademarked images, patented images, or other IP, viruses, worms, etc.

This is the image. I took an image of a King card from my Royalty Free Art Explosion image library, made it a line drawing, added a club, a K, "Texas Hold'Em" in Rosewood Std font, and slapped a tan background on it, and voila! I thought it looked pretty cool.

So what's the problem? Does it look "Vintage"? Is a King a celebrity or infamous person? The thing is that according to the restrictions, they can reject an image without explanation. Well, if I'm selling the stuff, it would be nice to know why things are rejected because 1.) I've got a customer who is willing to drop a chunk of change in my store, and it's just bad business to let them hanging when I'm not even notified, and 2.) how can I correct a problem if I don't know what the problem even is?

I'm not posting this to be argumentative or slam any services, I'm just frustrated that something that was a pretty cool idea gets censored (no better word for it, I guess) with no explanation, while the poor customer sits waiting to receive the order placed over a week ago.

And if the customer who placed this particular oder happens to be reading this, I apologize profusely for the inconvienence, and I hope to get to the bottom of the whole thing soon.

Anyone else have any similar experiences?