Hi everyone,

This update is for AUS/NZ backers. Here is the latest on the fulfillment situation. As you all may remember from this earlier update, the pallet headed to Australia was lost and eventually found.

For today’s update, let’s start by quoting verbatim what the fulfillment company recently provided to us:

So, what’s next? AUS/NZ backers, I think we’re at a crossroads. Here is what we’re considering, so please provide your input.

First, as a preamble, know that we do anticipate having enough stock to fill most if not all orders, just not necessarily “in Australia right now.” We always overprint by about 10%. We’ve actually taken flak for this in the past, because if we have leftover Kickstarter exclusives we put them up for sale in our online store. But this scenario is a perfect example of why we overprint. Most of our crowdfunding projects suffer some degree of “lost or damaged by the mailman,” and we use the overprints to replace those. This is the first time we’ve had a full pallet disappear, and thank goodness we have extras! I suspect we will be able to replace everything on it, though the overprints goods are probably in the USA, UK or Canada.

So here are the possible options. Think of this as “taking the temperature of the room.” We are still waiting to find out what the final inventory comes out to be. Options are some mix of these:

What are your thoughts, friends and backers down under?

P.S. We will continue to post updates as we get more information.

Hi everyone,

This update is for AUS/NZ backers. Everyone else can ignore - or frankly you might want to read it, for it's an improbable tale.

Short version: AUZ/NZ backers, fulfillment will start very soon, probably late next week. I know we have said this several times, but our fulfillment partners has given us strong reason to believe it's actually true this time. Over the course of the last two weeks, we learned that the Purple Planet pallet had been completely lost, and has now been found, at what we can only describe as "a random freight depot somewhere in Australia."

Long version: This is a tale that goes back several months and which we're now calling The Mystery of The Missing Pallet. At each step along the way, the story changed and we got different answers. In the end, it took old-fashioned detective work and people actually physically inspecting multiple locations in the USA and Australia to figure out what happened. We've been on the phone to Australia every night for almost two weeks (our nights = your days, Aussies), and also spoken to people on site in locations in Portland, LA, and several spots in Australia. Here is the sordid tale.

One important thing to note: there's a big difference between digital verification and physical verification. At each step in this process, the digital record showed "everything is on track." The problem is, at a certain point the digital record deviated from the physical reality.

On February 3, the pallet left our USA fulfillment partner in Portland. On February 4 it arrived in LA. On February 24th, the pallet was loaded on to a container at the port of LA. We have a photo from that day showing the pallet and all the documentation matches (weight, height, carton count, etc. - you can even see our logo on the cartons).

On March 29th, the container arrived at the Sydney port. There is concrete documentation of the container arriving at port.

A couple days later, the container was unloaded at the local hub and then delivered to the fulfillment partner's warehouse. Our Purple Planet pallet was one of roughly 20 pallets on the container. There is supposedly a Proof of Delivery document showing that all the pallets arrived. (We haven't actually seen this document, but we've been told "it matches.") The fulfillment partner's local staff noted that one of the pallets on the container did not match the height / weight listed on the manifest. There is purportedly a photo of that one "mismatch" pallet. However, there are no photos of the other 19 pallets. In addition, the fulfillment partner's receiving crew didn't file the appropriate paperwork indicating there was a receiving discrepancy. So it's hard to say with 100% certainty if the error was introduced here or upstream of here. But we believe the error happened at the local hub, and the delivery to the fulfillment partner's warehouse was in some way incorrect. This also ties back to the local fulfillment partner moving warehouses, which we'll come back to in a bit.

From this point forward, it appears that the physical record does not match the digital record. It's also important to remember that there is a big difference between "warehouse workers just doing their job" and "the management team who know the plan." What appears to have happened is that the local warehouse workers noted the discrepancy in the pallets, wrote it down... and then just moved on. It appears they recorded digital inventory that matched the pallet's "digital contents of record" without doing a physical count, even though they had noted that one pallet didn't match the records. Therefore, the digital record showed that our pallet has arrived, even though that didn't match the physical reality. The management team referenced the digital record, believed Purple Planet had arrived, and queued it up for fulfillment.

At this point the details get a little fuzzy, but what we speculate is that Purple Planet "got to the top of the queue" for fulfillment a couple times. At each point, the local staff simply couldn't locate the inventory that their digital record indicated was on hand, so they skipped it, moved on to the next project, and Purple Planet fell back down in the queue. Each time we inquired as to the status, it was always "in the queue after we finish This Project and That Other Project." None of us caught that it was in a perpetual loop, and the digital records didn't match the physical records.

As we started pushing more aggressively for updates on the timeline, and eventually started asking for daily updates, the management team started paying closer attention to the Purple Planet project. At this point it became clear that something was seriously awry. Over the course of multiple phone calls with our Australian fulfillment partner, they discovered that the physical inventory was completely missing. We've been on the phone with Australia every night for most of the last two weeks, and spent a big chunk of today talking to the contacts in Portland and LA to verify "physical reality" against what the digital record shows.

As of two days ago, the Australian fulfillment partner was telling us the pallet was still in LA at the freight forwarder. As some of you know, there are protests in LA. Yesterday, the freight forwarder couldn't get staff into their facility to do an inspection. Today, we spoke with the LA forwarder, and they were able to get staff to physically walk the warehouse searching for the pallet. They verified it really wasn't there, so the physical reality matched the digital reality as of that point in the trail.

After more conversations with Australia tonight, our partner there agreed the pallet must be in Australia somewhere. They had previously had their old warehouse location inspected for it, and now agreed it was possible that the pallet was somewhere between Sydney and the old warehouse location. So the local agent started calling all the freight depots between the port and their former warehouse. And this is where they got lucky. Remember how we mentioned, in this update from three months ago, that the local fulfillment partner had moved warehouses? Our pallet evidently had been delivered to the old warehouse. But by the time it was delivered, the old warehouse was empty and vacant, and the telephone number was disconnected. So the freight company didn't leave it on site, but stashed it in the "lost freight" corner of the local depot, where it has sat for months. When the local agent phoned today, they were told, "Yeah, we do have an undeliverable pallet here that matches those dimensions, and it's full of some sci-fi books and dice..."

The local freight depot had partially opened several of the cartons on the pallet in an attempt to identify who it might belong to. They are currently re-packing the pallet. It's possible some stock is damaged or missing by the local depot's well-intentioned attempt to identify the pallet's owner. We'll find out when it finally gets delivered to our fulfillment partner's local warehouse.
 
Australian and New Zealand backers, we are very sorry for all the delays and this insane tale. We'll stay in close contact with the fulfillment partner. By the way, they are EXTREMELY apologetic and can't wait to get this project cleared off their docket, so I think they will ship it very rapidly when the pallet finally moves out of that freight depot to their warehouse. For quite some time, the story we'd been told kept changing. But now that we have talked to quite literally everyone in the chain from Portland to LA to Australia, we're fairly confident we have the final, accurate version of what has happened. We will keep you informed as to what we hear next...