Where's The Loot? (And March Reveal)

^^ There's the March loot! Now, onto the main topic of this post.

Where's the loot?! Indeed. To start with the good, we've now worked out the various problems that arose recently, and things are back on track. Now, to explain what actually happened.

The operational side of loot (so, QC, packing, postage, etc) started to go a little off the rails last year. This happened around the same time we'd had a few strokes of back luck on the video production side. Compounding on that, the docs think I've managed to develop Fibromyalgia, or something along those lines, which has made some aspects of this challenging.

So! I decided that we needed to stop working hard, and instead work smart. Loot is very labour intensive. Turns out that packing hundreds of things takes a lot of time. Add that to the video schedule & people not being in the office to help due to WFH, and it just took a lot out of us. Even the process of printing and sticking labels takes a few hours, and this is something that often ran well into the night. ...which would of course leave Matt & myself throughly burnt out.

I realised that this was all a failure in leadership from me. It's my job to keep us working smart, not hard. 

The smart thing to do is to have loot fulfilment done externally via a fulfilment centre. The way that this works is we have everything shipped to us. We then check it's all okay, and send it on to the fulfilment people. When orders come through, all I have to do is send over a CSV of orders, and they handle the rest. 

Simple, right?

In theory it was. Reality was a little different. First, Patreon spits out order information in a way that's incomparable with their data verification, meaning that the whole CSV needs to be reformatted. Funky - and not helped by their CSV importer experiencing a bug that imported everything incorrectly, leading to us having to wait 4 days while they investigated what went wrong. We had another fun problem crop up where our envelopes were scanned in twice on their end, meaning they thought they had 988, when in reality they had far less.

At this stage I was a bit concerned, so I didn't rush forward with all our pending orders (January & February). If that partner wasn't going to work out, then the last thing I want is all of our loot to be in their warehouse!

As of today, we've resolved all the quirks. I've outlined the design for a script that'll automatically convert Patreon's formatting into their formatting, and I've sent everything to them, as well as instructional videos on how to pack correctly to ensure everything is safe. On that point, we're now using custom bubble mailer and extra rigidity cards, so loot will be safe, even if the mail person decides to leave them out in the rain. (Yep, this happened to one of our Patrons last year!)

I've had a few calls & email chains with the fulfillment people, and am now assured that all the kinks are ironed out, and that we're ready to go. For sure I can say it was extremely cool to upload a file, and wake up the next morning to see that ***hundreds*** of orders had been dispatched.

Another nice perk is that since they're a large company, their shipping is actually a little faster and cheaper than what we had previously with Royal Mail. This has let us increase the size of our pins by 1cm!

The other benefit is that this will let us do more cool things in the future. We haven't been able to run a store or sell leftover pins etc because we're just not set up to consistently handle orders. With our new set-up, we just connect the fulfilment people to a storefront, and the rest handles itself! That said, i'm going to wait until we have multiple months of smooth running under our belt before I look into anything else.

So, that's the short version of the saga! Turns out things that look simple on the surface often hidden complexities that aren't intuitive. Seeing problems before they arise is part of my role - one that i've failed in here. I'm extremely sorry for not being on the ball enough to handle this correctly.

Next steps

- 2000 envelopes arrived at the fulfilment centre today.

- I have QC'd all January & February pins.

- All Jan & Feb loot is packed up with a shipping label, and will be sent to the fulfilment centre tomorrow morning.

- All March loot is in the office, and will be sent to the fulfilment centre tomorrow morning. This will allow for March loot to be shipped to you as soon as the month ends.

- I've a full & reformatted list of all Jan / Feb orders. These orders will be created with our fulfilment partner as soon as all the items have arrived in their warehouse, which will be early next week.

- The art team has already completed April loot, and concepted the entire rest of the year.

- We'll have a Pale Beyond special in April/May.

Let me know if you've got any questions! 

- Michael