TL;DR: if you’re in the UK, Europe, Africa or the Middle East, your addresses are locking down today. You will have an email from BackerKit about this.

Everyone else: books are in transit to the final warehouses, on schedule.

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Freight deliveries for the USA and Australian warehouses are under way, as predicted in the last update, and will then move onwards to warehouses by road & rail.

Expectations remain that Australian packages will arrive at the warehouse by the end of May, and USA items expected for Port arrival before the end of May, followed by Duties, Amtrak and final truck delivery to the warehouse.

Here’s the timeline, broken down by region:

We’re almost ready to send our warehouse team fulfilment data. The last hurdle is getting all of your addresses locked in BackerKit. That email will be coming to you after this update and will give you 48hrs to make any address amendments.

Once that’s done, we crunch that data, and prep it for uploading to our Fulfilment partners at the warehouses. We’ve instructed them to be ready for upload on Tuesday next week (12th May), and then items start flying out the doors towards you.

We’ve asked them to prepare the smaller and quicker packages first, before moving on to larger, more complex orders (or anything where they need to produce export paperwork - Norway, Switzerland etc).

It will be our first time running a crowdfunding fulfilment with our new EU warehouse partners, Meeples. They have plenty of experience doing this kind of exercise, and they’ve had 2-3 months of fulfilling our website orders as well, so we’re excited to see how much smoother the process is when we don’t have to process EU Import paperwork for all our large parcels.

It will take a few weeks to fill all these orders. You’ll receive a tracking code and we will also update your order in Backerkit so you know when it’s shipped. We’ll also update you again when fulfilment is done, so you know if there’s been some unexpected error. 

The last orders to these territories should ship before the end of May.

USA freight is due on a boat in Rotterdam tomorrow (8th May). Should be on the mainland about 2 weeks later.

After some formal checks and the ritual dance of the paperwork, it will be sent by Amtrak (ew) and truck (sigh) to reach the main warehouse. Once we know we’ve cleared USA border controls and the railroads to Tennessee are free from Heart Incursions, we’ll lock addresses and get your fulfilment started. More soon.

Our Australian freight forwarders told us that the cargo was cleared for delivery today. So that will get loaded onto an aeroplane. I doubt it, but in my mind I like to imagine it’s one of those old Douglas C-47 Skytrains and the pallets get pushed out the back with parachutes like it’s the Berlin airlift…

Anyway, this normally takes a week to 10 days for it to be counted into the warehouse in Sydney and for the world to rotate sufficiently for both the Australians and the Brits to be awake for 1 work cycle to check everything over.

Once we know we’ve cleared Australian border controls and it’s all been inspected for sand contaminated with soil or driftwood (absence, not presence), we’ll lock addresses and get your fulfilment started. More soon.

Thanks enormously for your patience and support, folks - we couldn’t do any of this without you. 

We’d love to see pictures of your parcels as they start to arrive - you can tag us on Instagram, Bluesky or Facebook, or pop links in the comments here. 

Or join our Discord server and chat to others about all things Heart? 

As always, there’s a risk things will get dinged, damaged or lost in transit. If that happens to you, we want to put it right. We recommend taking photos of your parcel and the products inside if you’re worried there may be damage to your items - this helps speed up the claims process and get replacements sent out quicker.

If anything goes wrong with your parcel, get in touch with Jim or myself in the Customer Service mines by emailing [email protected]. 

We’ll write again once we’re ready to lock other addresses, or in early June, whichever occurs sooner.

xoxo

– Alex, and everyone at RR&D