hey everyone! with the lunar new year holiday over, our manufacturer returned to work this week, which means our first three bags -- the brown bat, the honduran white bat, & the dreamy bat -- are officially entering production! 🦇💜

additionally, all the campaign pins, including the bat head pins, the campaign exclusive pins, the cross collab pins, etc, are also all entering production this week as well. ✨️ we've discussed options with our distribution company, white squirrel, & they've agreed to take over handling shipment of all add-on items in addition to the batpacks, which is great! it means that everyone will be getting their items all together in one package, & as soon as all items arrive at white squirrel, shipments can start going out! which bumps up our timeline by a huge amount 🥹

we've also begun the sampling process for our last four bags! things are chugging along smoothly, which is just such a huge relief after the stress of the last few weeks. (see my last update if you wanna hear the whole spiel abt that)

ONE LAST THING: my pintopia campaign, to the moon & back, ends in just 5 HOURS, and there's lots of cool freebies and deals you can get if you back the project during the campaign period!

we have 7 unlocked designs to choose from (one not shown here), & there's also a freebie pin you can get if you also pledged for the batpacks!

don't forget to check out all the other pintopia campaigns -- everyone's been working insanely hard!! 

thats all from me for now! ill be back with more production updates soon 🖤

thank you so much to everyone who took the time to vote in my last poll & share their thoughts on the situation with marine & tangerine bat. i wanted to be sure that i approached the situation as fairly as i could with the circumstances im currently in, while doing my best to abide by the wishes of a majority of my backers.

as im sure many of you saw already, the majority of backers voted to go ahead with swapping their orders out for different designs, and keeping marine bat & tangerine bat on the shelf for now to potentially return in a different campaign. 

i know SO many of you loved marine & tangerine bat, and i know this wasnt the solution some of you wanted -- i hope i was able to at the very least show that i was doing my best to find a compromise that worked best for everyone. 💔

to answer some general questions im sure some of you have:

- if you ordered tangerine and/or marine bat and choose to keep your pledge, you'll recieve an additional bat head pin of your original choice as an apology!

- yes, you are more than welcome to request a refund (either for just your affected batpack or your entire pledge). just reply to the email and let me know!

- if tangerine and/or marine bat come back in a later campaign, ill figure out a way to additionally compensate anyone who chooses to back this potential later campaign who wanted marine/tangerine originally. I'm not sure what that will look like yet (or if/when a batpack series 2 will be -- we gotta finish out this one first!), but i have everyone's emails so I'll keep you all updated!

now, there's some additional context that affected my decision to cut marine & tangerine bat, which I didnt feel comfortable sharing initially -- things were still up in the air & i didnt want my own personal circumstances to sway anyone's thoughts on the matter. now that everyone's voted, i do feel that its important to give you guys the full picture!

hello everyone! I hope youre all having a great week -- while my manufacturer has been break for the lunar new year, ive been busy behind the scenes working on administrative & logistical things!

as I've been tallying up final order quantities for ordering the batpacks, I've encountered an issue that I wanted to run past you guys, my backers, and see what you all thought about it -- I want to be not just transparent, but also as fair as possible!

the long & short of it is that as much as I personally love marine bat and tangerine bat, they haven't been getting a lot of love compared to the other designs. they're both lagging behind considerably in orders, and I'm talking WAY behind. for reference, my minimum order quantity per design is 100, and between both tangerine bat & marine bat combined (so, at minimum, a 200 bag order), they've been sold 33 times.

33 out of 200 is a lot of excess stock, and if these designs arent selling well now, I'm unsure how well they will sell in my regular shop, in wholesale, etc. it would be a waste of materials, as well, which I could be using to make more of the popular designs so people can buy them in the future. 

but, ultimately, this is a mistake I made by not having designs unlock in a way where backers could choose the designs they like best -- and I've certainly learned my lesson! so if I have to eat the cost of the excess stock, so be it. 

however, I wanted to first ask how people felt about a different solution: cutting the marine bat & tangerine bat designs and having people pick a new design instead.  

obviously this would come with the option of a refund instead, if you were deadset on that design! and, as a bonus, since the respective matching head pins of both tangerine & marine bat will still be made, backers who make the switch will get an extra bat head pin of the original design they chose as an apology for the trouble!

what do you all think? would you guys prefer that I keep all the designs, or would you be open to switching to another design instead? again, this isn't something I'd want to do without knowing if it's okay with ya'll first, so please do let me know 🥹

as always, thank you so much for all the support & i'm very interested in hearing what you guys think!

thank you to everyone who's shared their thoughts on the situation with marine bat & tangerine bat so far -- please do keep commenting and let me know what you think in my last update here.

in response to the feedback so far, i wanted to make a proper poll to gauge the thoughts of everyone who may not want to or being able to comment, so this update is mostly to announce the existence of the poll -- apologies that it ends so soon, but I need to be able to let my manufacturer know the plan ASAP once they're back from the lunar new year break.

please vote in the poll below! there's no right or wrong answer here, so don't feel pressured to vote either way.

EDIT: something I COMPLETELY forgot to even mention in the main update was that the upcoming changes in tariffs have been on my mind, too. not having the marine & tangerine bats would not just save thousands in manufacturing costs, but may also shave off thousands in the eventual tariff bill as well, which has, admittedly, been worrying me a bit 🥲 

(there ARE additional factors that i wish i could share, but unfortunately it's not something I really feel comfortable sharing publicly yet until I know for sure what the path moving forward is. just so you guys know that this decision to consider cutting them wasn't made on a whim & that I've been ruminating on it quite a bit.)