Hey friends! I really apologize that this update has taken so long - things have been messy (but cleaner now) in the last few months, both personally and professionally, and I’ll admit that I’ve been a bit underwater trying to get things sorted as it was a lot of things all at once, and I’m a single human that’s been trying to dig myself out of it.

If you’ve been following along with our other campaign Purrtagonists, it was just an unfortunate mess with one of the major manufacturers of Venetia’s pins where some of the pins they returned had a 90%+ error rate. It created a lot of initial hangups with its multitude of designs; it has been effectively locked for months getting back funds and struggling to make headway, and we were set back a substantial amount (about $14,000 plus the remake costs). Normally this wouldn’t impact anything but itself, but it was far past the normal line and impacted a large amount of things since I was covering the costs of remakes (and the overage that the campaign incurred). We’ve started to see small resolutions there (plus having an end of year sale where some of those costs were recouped) so things are looking better.

Initially the other campaign wasn’t an issue that impacted this one, but the manufacturer I’d originally chosen for this campaign was having issues with the cutouts with the Venti pins. Normally we could work around this, but in a pin where it’s relatively prevalent, it was an issue we had to work on and try to fix. After a long back and forth, it was clear it wasn’t happening and the altered art that kept happening wasn’t going to cut it. As such, I ended up needing to cut my losses on the sample, refund the remaining costs, and go to one of my other manufacturers that has been more reliable in the last year (one that has actively shown good and normal progress in the past half year) - normally I’d start on this process while asking for a refund, but due to the issue with Purrtagonists and how far into the red that had dragged me during that time period, I had to wait until some of the funds were returned. This part of the migration is already done, and I’m hoping to have a new sample to show very soon. I’m sorry for not touching base sooner, but there were weeks I thought it might work, then others I was fighting to get funds back, and going around in circles about it. I’ll update here the same day I have the new sample. The art hasn’t changed!

My goal is to have the surveys for addresses out in the beginning of the coming month; I’ll honor initial requests for add-ons (to complete the set or get additional sets), but anything through the separated preorder store will be adjusted for the additional sampling costs that were lost. (TL;DR - That won’t impact you, but people outside of the campaign.)