Hello everyone ~

How the hell is it August already.

For anyone who didn't know... Shipping rules changed again for both the EU AND the US. Tariffs and fees increased across the board, and there are new packaging rules coming into place. Its taken us a long time to figure out how to move forwards.

We think we've got it. Shipping out is moving ahead next week. 

There IS another charge for EU backers. Its the same one as before, its the 20% import VAT/customs charge. We only just figured out how to apply it to backers we already charged. I can only apologise again, but there's no choice left now. That will go out as soon as BK can arrange it for us, the work is all done on this end. We haven't added the handling fees this time. 

There's are also extra fees for US packages now, but for this project we're covering those as well, since we already charged shipping. Just know that moving forwards charges will be at 15% instead of 10%. 

There's a huge stack of boxes ready to go. They're going out at the same time as tarot and summer market packages. Hopefully we're getting close to being done. Fingers crossed nothing else changes before then.

Happy Autumn folks! I'll keep you posted.

Parts of this update are copy/pasted across different campaigns.

The overview currently looks like this;
Midnight Ocean ~ In production/shipping phase one
Mythical Garden ~ Shipping (temporarily on pause)
Curiosity Shop ~ In production
Pods and Pots ~ In production
Literary Critters ~ Survey coming soon

This is going to be a rough one folks, I'm sorry. If you're backing from the US or Europe please make sure you read it all over. This kind of hit us out of nowhere.

There are new paperwork requirements going into place for items moving into the US. The wording is... Extremely unclear, and we're pausing shipping while we figure this out. If you requested your package be sent last month, then it was already sent out before this came into place. If you haven't had a shipping notification, it hasn't gone out yet. We have a lot of orders packed and ready to go here, we're just confirming our obligations in case we get into trouble. There are no extra fees associated, just a shipping delay. We're intending to send the remaining orders out at the same time as the summer sale orders, but because they're packed already and because of tariff charges, we cannot combine shipping. 

This one's the kicker, and there's just nothing I can do about it.

As of July 1st, a new rule went into a place that introduced a flat handling fee of £3 per item type included in any package heading into the EU. This is standard across all the EU countries as far as we can tell. We are not sure if that includes free items at the moment, we're still trying to figure out the details. So every EU package that hasn't already been shipped now owes an extra £3 postage. Usually it would be £3 for every different type of product, but for just this one time we'll cover any extra product types since there was no indication of this when the orders were made and charged.

On top of that, some EU countries are now requiring us to pay customs/import fees up front (so at point of sale). We no longer have the option of shipping 'recipient pays fees'. We aren't entirely sure which countries yet; we're still investigating. So from now on, and including all packages that haven't yet been sent from this campaign, shipping is going to have to include the appropriate customs fees for EU countries upfront.

Until these extra fees are paid, we can't send out your EU orders. We're working with Backerkit at the moment to see if there's an easy way to do this, or if we need to contact everyone individually and request payment that way. Unfortunately, customs fees have always been the responsibility of the customers; but we've always been able to mark that it'll be paid on receipt of the package rather than up front on our end. I know in the UK we aren't always charged when a package arrives. I'm sorry if that was the case but from now on, we just can't do that any more. 


For non US and EU backers, packages are still going out. If they haven't gone before then, we intend to get them out in a big shipment with the summer sale orders.

For anyone who doesn't know, Royal Mail have been phasing out services across the UK for months now. We live in the ass end of nowhere, and its proven a challenge to get orders out in a timely fashion. When we moved they were still doing collections, but once we started using those regularly they phased them out for our area. So we switched to printing the labels at the post office and that closed down. Then we bought a label printer to do our own and now the drop off point is saying they're overwhelmed -_-. We're going to book a taxi to the big post office in town when the summer sale orders are packed, and after that we're investigating other options for the next campaigns. Its going to mean waiting until we have entire campaigns packed up to send them all off at once, unfortunately. 


That's it for now. We'll work on resolving the EU charges as soon as possible and I hope we will have everyone's packages out asap, its just... Very unfortunate its worked out this way. I'm sorry for the delays, as always. What the hell is going on with the world.