Hey all,
 I want to apologize for the delay in updates. Its been, as always, very busy in the backend of things. Though the past month Ive had my hands full while on paternity leave (mostly hands full with the toddler) and preparing everything for tax season.  That said, things have been moving.

As far as Im aware, the keychain plushes had their design finalized (we had some tweaks when it came to hte back spikes, color and materials), and they had started production. Im just finishing the last of the hang-tag designs, and (unfortunately don't have pictures yet, but I should be getting them soon) the production is nearly done! (that said tarrifs impose a new problem, see below)

Pins
We were already starting to run low on our pins, so a re-order was about due. Even though we haven't yet sent out surveys,  we still had a good idea of how many additional pins we needed to order (esp since we wanted to introduce the pins to retail).  With that goal, we took a step back to number and define design-sets for our pins.
So now, moving forward, every pin has our logo, pin number

and on the back, we have the name, set, pin artist, barcode and sku (which is good for retail).

Manufacturing for these is nearly done (pretty sure they were saying they were gonna finish next week.
From this order we're producing around 15,000 total pins!

All of the art in the background was done by Koit Paales!

When backerkit opens you'll have pick on all the pins that are being produced

So, this is the section that everyone been talking about, because it does suck and it does literally affect everyone.  As of right now there' a 145% tariff on goods from China. And that really sucks.
At this point we're evaluating our options. I am not opposed to just fronting the bill and getting the product... (with this manufacturer, the cost per unit is low enough that we could still come out positive after sales), it just sucks a whole lot more with a more than double the cost per unit increase.
I will still be coordinating with our Australian and United Kingdom warehouse to facilitate fulfillment (no reason to slow those down). 
But for the Americas, we're still figuring things out, we might eat it, we might storage it in china for a few months and see when things drop, or we'll find another way (other manufacturers have talked about potentially importing to other countries then importing to the US under that country's tariff rate, though thats speculation at this point).
We're currently figuring that out and letting you know when a decision is made. But at this point I have no intention of asking you to pay for more (of course chipping in always helps), but Im not going to demand or hold back because of the chaos that is happening.

That leads us into confirming what numbers we'll be looking at.

Now that I've gotten some of my other immediate hurdles out of the way with (like taxes), I can get the Pledge Manager up and running. (im sorry theres been a long delay),
Fortunately, I don't really have to do a count on product, since we're ordering nearly double of what's currently existing for the campaign (around ~2.5-3kof each of the keychains).  And smae with the pins, we already have rough number estimates, so I was able to extrapolate and expand, so that production was going (despite me not posting updates, apologies!).


I think things are crazy, but we're getting through it. 
Caretaker Andreas