Hello there, folks! Matt Sheridan, here. I'm in charge of Iron Circus' Shipping and Receiving, local warehouse oversight, and crowdfund fulfillment, with our partners at White Squirrel, Pirate Ship, and Juniper. Lackadaisy is the thirty-eighth crowdfund fulfillment I've administered, and the sixteenth I've set up fulfillment for via Backerkit. With that in mind: Let's talk SHIPPING. More specifically:

There’s a lot going on here, so this will be a bit long. Sorry!

So! We’ve got three different categories of physical rewards in this campaign: books, drop-shippable items, and everything else.

Books will be shipped via USPS Media Mail within the U.S., and via the cheapest available method outside the U.S. (which is typically Pirate Ship for light parcels and USPS Priority International for everything else). All books, whether from backer levels or add-ons, are combined together and charged as a single, books-only shipment.

All four plushes and the commemorative keychain will be drop-shipped by the manufacturer. That would be Juniper. This allows us to ship the plushes for $9 each and the keychains for $6 everywhere in the world. They’re shipped and charged individually, since it’s the manufacturer and not our fulfillment company sending them. That means if you ordered multiple plushes/keychains, they'll be shipped individually, not bundled together.

Finally, there’s the non-book, non-dropshipped category. This includes the card games and the pin sets. These can’t be sent via USPS Media Mail, so they’ll be shipped in the U.S. through USPS Ground Advantage (the next cheapest option) and outside the U.S. they use Pirate Ship or USPS Priority International. Shipments for these items are combined together, but not with books—since that would make Media Mail rates impossible and the cheaper Pirate Ship rates less likely to be used, and since the pins are likely to need different kinds of packaging from books anyway.

Shipments of non-dropshipped items—that is, the books, card games, and pins—have a small additional fee to cover packaging and labor. For the plushes and keychains, that’s already included in the flat fees.

Every decision we’ve made in setting up our shipping policies was to give the largest portion of our backers the cheapest possible rates within the limitations of the services available to us and the tools that BackerKit has to calculate shipping costs. We ran our fee spreadsheets by our fulfillment company to make sure our math was correct, and BackerKit worked with us extensively to help us make this elaborate multi-category system work.

We can’t offer Amazon-level shipping, because Amazon is already using those resources. Also: we are TINY, and giants like Amazon offer an unbeatable economy of scale. Small companies like Iron Circus are limited to the same consumer shipping services that regular folks use, and those have been getting steadily more expensive as a handful of massive companies have taken up more and more of the world’s shipping infrastructure. A lot of folks in our weight class have stopped offering international shipping for their crowdfunds at all! But we didn't want to do that; Lackadaisy has fans all over the world.

And finally: We aren't offering the blu-rays during fulfillment because... the show isn't done yet. We simply don't have the information we'd need to source an accurate quote. The blu-rays will be offered in the future, when the first season is complete, as pre-order.

Folks, we recognize that the shipping costs involved with this crowdfund are expensive, but they are literally the best we can do. We presented the most accurate estimates we could for shipping rates at the start of the campaign, and in some cases we’ve managed to deliver better rates than those through drop-shipping and Pirate Ship. If you find that these shipping costs are unacceptable, you are able to cancel your pledge in th fulfillment interface and receive a full refund. No hard feelings, we promise!

Hopefully, that answers all your questions about shipping. If there's anything I forgot to cover, Iron Circus Customer Service Guy Clint Pereira will be in the comments, answering them best he can! Thanks again for your time and understanding, everybody.