It's been some time since my last update, and I thank you all for your patience. It's been a challenging time for Bully Pulpit (and the world) for the last few months. I'm here to finally give you an update on our progress.
When I last wrote I talked about the tariff situation and how we were exploring other options for printing Zhenya's Wonder Tales, such as working with European manufacturers. Those efforts took a while to negotiate and ultimately proved fruitless- printing in China is simply the most cost-effective option available for the quality that we want. Even with the 145% tariffs that we were looking at in May, it would still be cheaper to use our Chinese partners.
With that in mind, and considering the temporary tariff "truce", we finally decided our best option was to continue with our original plan and use Panda Game Manufacturing and hope for the best. We submitted our files and found that there were some adjustments that needed to be made, so we've been working on that with the help of our friend Hal Mangold (thanks Hal!).
Now we're at the stage of reviewing the digital proofs from Panda. Once those are approved Panda will create a print proof and ship that to us to check. We'll likely have that by mid-August, and we'll be sure to share photos of it with you.
A shot of the digital proof for some of the cards, laid out in a 54 card printing sheet
Once that's approved (and assuming no problems that need to be fixed), production will take around 8-12 weeks. Freight to our warehouse partners in the U.S. will likely take another month or so, which means we're expecting to have it in hand by early December.
Please note that we're crossing our fingers that the tariff situation will be reasonable when it's time to ship. Currently the government is saying the tariff will increase to 55% in August. If it increases again, we may be forced to warehouse the games in China until there is an affordable window of opportunity.
Assuming an arrival in December, and depending on holiday shipping delays, we would expect shipments from our warehouse to you to take 1-2 weeks.
TL;DR - printing for Zhenya's Wonder Tales is finally underway, but our estimated delivery is delayed by two months.
We've been holding off on making the pledge manager available until we had a better sense of our plans and shipping schedule, but we'll get that together soon and let you know when it's ready.
I'm happy to go into details about the costs in the comments for anyone who is interested.
