You might remember from the last update that manufacturing had wrapped up. That meant shipping was next, and ship they did! 60 cartons containing over 1 ton of weight in unstuffed plush left the manufacturer and the chaos began. It has not been completely clean-cut and there were some mishaps, so let me tell you what I've been dealing with!
The plush were slated to arrive early on November 26th!
Thank goodness! The original delivery date was anticipating delivery being while we'd be away at Midwest Furfest, and I was not looking forward to an exhausted drive home to move all those packages and then an even worse drive back. But then on November 25th my wife comes in from work and says nervously, "Were we expecting some boxes?" A bunch of plush got stealth delivered in the pouring rain with not one knock upon our door and had been sitting out there for HOURS. Thankfully the fact the plush are packed under such absurd pressure means they need every single inch wrapped in tape, practically waterproofing them. Only boxes that had split on the sides got any water in it, and we got those inside, dried in heavy airflow with multiple dehydrators running nearby, and inspected thoroughly.
However, you can see not all of these are wrapped in tape, and that this certainly doesn't look like 60 boxes. All those out-of-place boxes with no tape protecting them had loose plush contents from boxes that couldn't hack the journey and were ripped beyond continued use. Like these things rip DRAMATICALLY whenever they give way. Some of those plush were.. not in the best shape. I'm glad I was able to order more than needed for this campaign, because I wasn't sure I was going to be able to salvage those.
Digging through tracking for all 60 boxes, it seemed one half of the order was scattered around Illinois, and the other half was marked with an unwelcome yellow exclamation mark. From there it was a slog of issues. At first the big problem was just these boxes sitting around not getting scanned. Then we got a bunch of snow and continued getting snow, so Fedex decided they would not be trying to deliver to us. So as the boxes slowly started accumulating in one spot they were just sitting at a facility where we had to somehow make the time during con crunch to drive way out and pick them up before they were shipped back. That would have been a VERY expensive problem to reverse. It's a long drive, the weather was making it dangerous, and we had to do it multiple times. I was gonna be so mad if I died over some stuffed werewolves y'all. I love plushies but yikes.
The rest of the boxes were still MIA. It took a couple weeks past the first arrivals for me to obtain most of them. At current there is still a single box out there somewhere, and every effort to track it down has failed, so that one is unfortunately in the process of having a claim filed for it.
But the important thing: enough plush have gotten here safe and sound!
As a refresher since it has been a bit since this was all announced: our original fulfillment window was February, but that was pushed back to May due to Pay-In-4 delaying me actually receiving sufficient funds to pay for manufacturing. I have not reverted that window! Since I did not expect these to come I'm booked solid through til mid-April. I will start working on fulfillment here and there, but I won't be committing to it full swing as our focus until we're approaching the current fulfillment window. Some potentially relevant updates:
I've gotten lots of practice with the industrial stuffing machine and have come to understand most of the quirks! My wife is still learning, but she's getting there. With 2 of us running the machine we can switch often to prevent repetitive motion injuries which keeps things moving!
Unlike my other campaigns I will not be the only person working full time on Lairbrew! My wife quit her job to work on the business with me instead, and having 2 people instead of 1 makes a huge difference. That will help prevent delays in fulfillment!
We have a new stuffing provider! They can fulfill much larger order volumes than how we were previously getting it, which is excellent since we will need a LOT to handle all these big plush. If it wasn't stuffing speed getting in our way before it was simply running out of stuffing and needing to wait for more, so that nips one particular bad issue in the bud.
With all that said, fulfillment for Carrion Baggage just concluded. So other than conventions and the upcoming launch of my Pintopia campaign Gnawesome Predators there's not much to get in the way of me starting to pick at things where I can! Which for that campaign, a couple designs might be of interest to y'all:
I'll see you when I next have something significant to report!
