Legendary Metal Coins season 6

Shipping update and Call for Help
over 1 year ago – Fri, Sep 09, 2022 at 01:35:43 AM

Hey everyone,

thank you all for the patience while we are working hard to complete the fulfilment of the project. We are currently waiting for QML to finish packing the coins in their warehouse. As soon as this happens, we will be able to ask Bridge to pick them up and finish shipping. Hopefully this will happen this week but we currently don't have a set deadline from QML. 

Call for Help

For the past couple of updates, we have been talking about the increased costs that have caused the additional delay and our departure from QML. Even though we now have to pay to transfer all the goods to a new warehouse (from QML to Bridge) things are now looking better.  We do however still need some external financial aid to fulfil the coins and at least partially tackle the increased costs of manufacturing, freight shipment and fulfillment. As discussed in the previous update, the majority of you, our backers, absolutely wouldn't like to launch a new coins campaign and generate the funds from there. We have raised some capital from other sources (including our website sales) but they unfortunately wouldn't cover it. The project is already in red but with your help we would still be able to ship the coins and continue to operate, hopefully launching new future projects. 

For the project to be able to be fulfilled we would need around $15 from each backer. We do not however wish to just charge everyone $15 since we understand everyone's circumstances are different. We have prepared a Google Form that we will be send to each of you, asking how much you are comfortable contributing to the fulfilment of the project. On Monday, the 12th of September we will add these costs to the Backerkit pledge manager and charge them.

We are also planning to offer an exclusive coin to everyone willing to support us with $15 or more. If we fund the season 7 campaign, we will send every supporter that donates $15 or more to help for shipping an exclusive brand new coin that we will design for this purpose. It will be a coin to thank you for helping us overcome this situation and we will only offer this to you, never making more in the future. 

UK 

The external financial aid, mentioned above, will also help us fulfil the coins for our UK backers. Gamesquest, during the assembly of the orders, realized that there were a few coins missing. Not wanting to split the fulfilment in two waves, we decided to postpone the shipments and immediately started a small production of these coins, here in Greece. These coins will be shipped in a few days from Athens and UK backers will receive their coins in September.

Please check out your inboxes for the call to the Google Form survey.  If you can't find it, please also check the Other/Spam/Promotion folder (depending on your email provider). 

Thank you for your continuous support and understanding

Drawlab Entertainment

Major Fulfilment update
over 1 year ago – Thu, Aug 25, 2022 at 11:04:06 PM

Hey everyone,

We had a major update in shipment this week. It’s been quite a development so it took us a few days to process, find a solution, and post this news.

Quartermaster Logistics reached out to us about some of the details and how they were presented in the previous update. Their points were valid, so I want to make a few corrections to our previous post before moving forward with the news:

1. Regarding the “extra work” on the project that we had not agreed to, QML wanted us to indicate that while our factory did an excellent job producing high quality coins, they packaged those coins in such a way that they needed additional time to sort and receive the product. The cartons were what’s called “mixed cartons” meaning they were packed with multiple products in the same carton, so  each carton had to be sorted for inventory purposes. This development was unfortunate. While QML did admit to us that the communication on this could have been clarified more, they did what they must in order to      receive and process our stock according to their standard procedures.
2. QML would also like us to point out that our description of their invoice as “65% more expensive than estimated” needs additional context. To be clear, QML did not provide any      estimate prior to the invoice we referenced as a point of comparison, so when we said it was more expensive, this was based on our own internal estimates. We used the rate sheets that QML provides on a quarterly basis  to create those internal estimates as well as their invoices from the fulfillment of the previous campaigns we did together. QML has been clear that these rate sheets are for informational purposes only and that the best way to get a preliminary estimate for a project is to request one from their  team. Due to the postage carrier rate increases since the campaign launch and several other factors, this did not result in an accurate picture of the total fulfillment costs. That, combined with additional expenses that we were unable to predict in advance (like the customs exam mentioned in point 3, below), this caused our surprise when our expenses totaled 65% more than we had anticipated.
3. The phrasing around our higher-than-anticipated freight costs also needs additional clarification and context. Although we  included notes about freight cost in a section entitled “QML update (USA/Canada/Australia/China),” we should be clear that QML did not coordinate our freight and are in no way responsible for these high freight costs or our Customs inspection at the US port. Although we did not explicitly say that they were at fault, we want to provide this additional clarification, as the context of our last update may have unintentionally indicated otherwise.

Based on several factors, mainly that our project has grown in size and scope since our initial conversations with QML, they have opted not to move forward with fulfillment for this campaign, as they believe it is no longer in our mutual best interest for them to do so. We will be shipping the goods from QML’s warehouse to another partner, who will handle fulfillment for this and future Legendary Metal Coins campaigns.

Next Steps

We have been in talks with a few fulfilment partners to move forward fast and get you your coins and our partner of choice in this is Bridge Distribution & Fulfilment. They know very well the scope of the project and we are already arranging all the stock to be picked up by QML and taken to Bridge. 

We're aiming this transport to happen on Friday, September 2nd and we are in talks with Bridge to ship everything during September.

We also want to thank you all for the very active participation in the discussion in our previous update. We really appreciate the understanding of the situation and we are taking your advice at heart. We have decided we will hold the season 7 Kickstarter until the orders of this project are fulfilled and we are actively researching other avenues to raise the required funds to do so (like the sale happening in our website for a few more days). 

Thank you for your support

Drawlab Entertainment

Shipping Update
over 1 year ago – Mon, Aug 08, 2022 at 06:16:34 AM

Hey everyone,

this is a tough update for us to write since there is still a degree of uncertainty involved, but we promised we will do our best to communicate with you and want to provide all information that we have so far. 

To start with the good news, all coins in EU have been shipped. The same applies to most shipments in the Rest of the World section, filled by Happyshops. If you live in EU and have not received your coins, please get in touch with us to check what has happened ([email protected]).

In the UK we are currently waiting from Gamesquest to update us on the status.

QML update (USA/ Canada/ Australia/ China)

This is the tough part of the update to write. You may recall that we were waiting from QML to provide us their final invoice, pay them and start shipping. We were hoping to receive it last week, start the shipments by the end of it and launch a new campaign (season 7) on Tuesday, August 2nd. 

The invoice arrived on Friday the 22nd and filled us with more questions than answers since it was 65% more expensive than estimated. This is on top of the freight shipping (that if you remember was more than 700% higher than the estimated cost) and the random $3,000 inspection cost at the port.  

Since then, we have made meetings and sent a lot of emails back and forth to understand why the cost was increased so much (65% is crazy) and what we can do about it. I can't go into depth about what their explanation is but it does include charges for extra work they did on the project that we had not agreed on and we now need to pay for. Since we are not a big company, we cannot comfortably just pay this and move on, especially when we feel the costs aren't justified. 

What happens now

With these new data, we have lost any profit that we had from the project and are looking for ways to fund the extra fulfilment cost to send you the coins you ordered. 

The easiest way to do so would, of course, be to ask you for an extra fee to send the coins to you. 

Another option we considered would be to launch Legendary Metal Coins season 7 first and send you the coins after the new campaign is funded. 

We don't like any of the options above so we decided to delay the season 7 campaign till the first week of September while currently trying to raise the funds ourselves from other sources. We will have another update this or the following week on what the outcome of all this is.  

In the meantime, it would mean a ton if you supported our next project with a follow on Kickstarter here.

Finally, to end this wall of text with some images, here is some footage of our coins in the QML warehouse:

~Thank you for your support~

    Drawlab Entertainment

July Shipping Update
almost 2 years ago – Fri, Jul 15, 2022 at 11:54:08 PM

Hey everyone,

we have some news on shipping the coins from all 3 fulfilment houses. Let us share more below.

Happyshops (EU/ Rest of the World)

Happyshops continues shipping the coins to all addresses. There was a bit of a delay this week due to some personal problems of the person responsible in shipping all our orders, but we expect that shipments will be completed next week! 

Quartermaster Logistics (USA/Canada)

Unfortunately, we are not happy with the progress here. They have received the coins in late May and they were still indexing unti early July. The indexing is now complete but they need more time for tabulation and they expect next week they will be able to quote our final invoice for them and send address verifications. This is very disappointing for us, since we were hoping everyone to have already received the coins. We have made clear what the situation is and how important that delay is to us and to you. They have shown understanding to make the process move faster and even promised to share some footage of their team building the orders soon. We hope we will be able to progress next week with orders getting shipped. 

Shipquest (UK)

Shipquest received the coins last (immediately after the UKGE) and there are new people handling the orders for us, taking a bit longer to coordinate. They now have all the data; we have answered several questions they had about packing and separating the coins and we believe we will have packages shipped from them next week as well.

In conclusion, there were delays in all fonts, but we are confident all coins are going to be shipped during July, hoping the majority to be shipped next week. We are confident Happyshops and Shipquest will be able to ship all the orders and we hope Quartermaster will also do the same. It is a very complicated project for the fulfilment houses due the huge number of SKUs (different products) they have to handle. Have in mind that a typical board game campaign has 3-5 SKUs and we have about 200 (between single coins, coin sets and velvet bags). 

We are ready to show understanding, but we also try to communicate daily and give them clear instruction on how to move the process forward to ship everything to you in time. Unfortunately, we regret that our efforts weren't enough to ship you the coins in the expected timelines but we are trying to make it happen sooner rather than later and we appreciate everyone's understanding in this. 

Because of the new delays, we decided not to launch our Season 7 campaign next week as planned, since we want the vast majority, if not all, of the packages for Season 6 shipped beforehand. As you know we also don't sell the new, Season 6, coins to distribution or through our website before you receive them and we don't want to offer the new ones before that. Despite the great business cost and all the effort we put in until now, the Season 7 campaign will be postponed for either July 26th or early August. 

If you want to learn more about the new campaign, you can subscribe to the new Kickstarter page by clicking the image below:

Thank you for your support

Drawlab Entertainment

The coins are getting shipped
almost 2 years ago – Tue, Jun 28, 2022 at 07:57:17 AM

Hey everyone,

we have news for you today! After a few weeks of discussion and a lot of spreadsheet files getting exchanged between us and the fulfilment houses we are more than happy to report that the first parcels of coins have been shipped. Let us share more information below

USA/ Canada

After several iterations of the new coin lists and explaining thoroughly what we need happening with the Stretch Goals, the Mystery coins and the shipments, we now have sent all the files to Quartermaster Logistics according to how they need in order to ship the coins to you. We also noticed that there were some pouches missing before sending the first coins so we were initially planning to split shipment in 2 waves but since it took the full 6 weeks to fix all the files and the bags are ready now, we are thinking of actually waiting the bags to arrive through plane next week and ship them all together. 

We are waiting for QML's response and according to that (and the airplane cost) we will either start shipping coins early next week, with a second wave 10 days later or ship all the coins 10 days later. 

We will post more on that next week.

UK

We have sent the coins to Shipquest. We are building the files needed for fulfilment according to their latest instructions and we expect them to proceed with them asap.

EU/ Rest of the World

Happyshops have started shipping the coins in EU and will continue to do the next week as well. Next regions will follow too. There might be a chance because of an internal error that you will receive a message from them twice about your order getting prepared. If that's the case ignore one of the two messages. If you have changed your address and you receive a mail stating the wrong address you can contact them directly and resolve this. Shipping these coins was really complicated for them and we did have several calls to work through the details (in one of them they informed us that they now see their coins in their sleep) but it seems that we are now all set to ship everything!

Thank you for your patience while we are completing this process. Here is a small reward, a sneak peek on what we have coming next!

That's all for today, we will post more next week according to the information we receive. Feel free to ask any questions in the comments.

Thank you for your support

  Drawlab Entertainment