Hey Everyone! 

Last time we left you we expected to have items shipping from our manufacturers to our fulfilment partners by the 14th of January. Unfortunately, our printing partner was unable to ship the items out until the 19th of January and it usually takes about a week to truck things from our printer in China to our fulfilment partner in Hong Kong. 

All the items arrived with our fulfilment partner on the 29th of January, a few days later than expected, and were inbounded with the warehouse over the course of that week. Inbounding items means adding the product SKUs to the warehouse database, measuring and weighing each item and counting the items to ensure the right amounts of everything have been manufactured (ensuring nothing was short-shipped).

Since then the fulfilment team have been hard at work packing items into shipping boxes and making sure all the addons are added to the orders appropriately while simultaneously searching for containers to load the packages onto. Everything we need to send the packages has been sourced and at this stage we're waiting for the next sailing schedule to be released on the 18th of February to lock down some space on ships. 

As always, there's something going on in the shipping industry which makes life more difficult. The Red Sea Crisis has caused major issues in the global shipping landscape and moved demand to alternative shipping lanes. As a small player in the shipping industry all we can do is work with our fulfilment partners to try and find space on ships as fast as possible. This is particularly evident in the European lanes as ships now need to avoid the Red Sea and Suez Canal and must go around Africa in order to reach Europe from Hong Kong. These delays have spurred increased demand which is making it more difficult to secure space on the ships.

Additionally, Chinese New Year increases demand on shipping vessels immediately before and after. However, with it coming to a close in the coming days our fulfilment partners will be doing everything they can to secure us space as quickly as possible. As of the end of this week our fulfilment partners will have completely returned to work and operating at 100%.

Due to the increased demand on shipping vessels we're looking to send via airfreight for some regions where possible. In particular, we're hoping to send European packages via air if possible to avoid the additional delays caused by the longer trip around Africa. This is a substantially more expensive option, but we will not be passing any of these costs onto backers.

Our fulfilment partners have estimated that we can expect tracking for all orders by the 15th of March. As always, this is the best estimate they can provide at this point in time and estimates are subject to change.

That's all the information we have for now. More updates coming as we confirm timelines for specific regions.

The Ghostfire Gaming Team