We're (mostly) on boats!
over 2 years ago – Sat, Dec 04, 2021 at 02:50:39 AM

Welcome to Decem-boat!

First, let's get that 2009 meme out of the way.

UK, EU, and Australia/New Zealand orders are on container ships

Australia/New Zealand orders are on the CMA CGM BELLINI. It is scheduled to dock in Adelaide, Australia on December 25th. Conveniently, our partner's warehouse is in Adelaide, so it will be a short trip to the warehouse. Fulfillment will likely begin in January.

EU orders are on the  AL RIFFA. It is scheduled to dock in Barcelona, Spain on December 17th. From there, the orders will be trucked to our warehouse across the border in France. Fulfillment will likely begin in January.

UK orders are on a very famous and special container ship called the EVER GIVEN. We are told that nothing bad has ever happened to this ship. It is scheduled to dock at Felixstowe on December 25th. From there, the orders will be trucked to our partner's warehouse in Telford. Felixstowe is a really congested port, so it's hard to give an estimate here. We hope fulfillment will begin in January, but could stretch into February.

Currently, the EVER GIVEN is making its way towards the Suez Canal on its way to the UK. 

Seriously, though, this isn't a joke. UK orders are truly on the EVER GIVEN. No ship has ever been stuck in the Suez Canal twice, so we feel pretty confident there won't be any delays.

If you want to track any of these ships, just google their names. There are plenty of websites that will let you do that.

Further delays can always happen due to port congestion and random customs inspections. At this point, things are out of our hands. Once your orders finally ship, you will get an email from our fulfillment partners with a tracking number.

Still waiting on a boat to the U.S.

No word yet on a new container ship for U.S./Canada/Rest of World orders. We'll update everyone immediately when that happens.

If you're an American and want your order to arrive as soon as possible, we have several suggestions:

1) Don't buy Christmas presents for anyone. Just quit buying stuff--except from us. The more we can reduce overall U.S. consumer demand, the better our chances of getting on a ship. You'll also be doing your part to help inflation!

2) Get your commercial driver's license to you can start a side gig as a long haul truck driver.

3) If that's too much of a hassle, we recommend quitting your job and working full time as a railyard worker, longshoreman, or customs inspector (preferably in Long Beach).

That's it. It's 7:00PM on a Friday and we're writing Kickstarter updates.

Living the dream!

Until next time,

The Little Plastic Train Company

Asia/Pacific orders shipped
over 2 years ago – Tue, Nov 23, 2021 at 12:37:27 AM

All orders to Asia/Pacific backers have shipped

If you live in the following locations, you should have received an email from us with a tracking number:

• China/Taiwan/Hong Kong
• Macao
• Japan
• Malaysia
• Singapore
• South Korea
• Brunei
• Indonesia
• Phillipines
• Thailand
• Vietnam

If you did not receive an email from us, email [email protected]. But first, please check your spam folders for the email.

We have no shipping related joke for this section. Instead, here is a gif we found on giphy.com when we typed in the word "Asia":

For everyone else, we're still waiting on boats

Once we receive confirmation your orders are on them, we'll let you know and update you with the ship information. Until then, we hesitate to give out ship names because bumping is endemic and we don't want to get anyone's hopes up. At this point, we're just assuming that we're getting bumped unless we hear otherwise.

At the moment, all we can say is the following:

•  UK backers: our intended ship is scheduled to arrive in port tomorrow. It is supposed to leave on November 25th and arrive in the UK on December 29th. That's if all goes according to plan. We could still be bumped.
•  Australia / New Zealand backers: our intended ship arrived in port yesterday. It arrived very late from its previous port of call. We currently have no estimated departure date or arrival date. We could still be bumped.
•  EU backers: we do not have a new ship assignment yet.
•  USA/Canada backers: we do not have a new ship assignment yet.

Believe us, if there were a reasonable way to get your goods out of China faster, we'd do it. Nobody is more frustrated at this situation than us. Unfortunately, there's still way too much cargo chasing way too few container ships right now. This is especially true for the EU and United States, where consumer demand is biggest.

We have no shipping related joke for this section. Instead, here is a gif we found on giphy.com when we typed in the word "bump":

Until next time,

The Little Plastic Train Company

Shipping update - yeah, you know
over 2 years ago – Wed, Nov 03, 2021 at 12:55:03 AM

Come on, you know pretty much what this update is going to say, right?

You're a Kickstarter backer. You've gotten these before.

Or you're a human being whose tried to buy stuff recently.

Things suuuuuuuuuck right now when it comes to international freight.

'Member when we joked in the last update that the shipping situation was like a fire on a ship?

Well, one of those actually happened.

Clearly, we have the ability to manipulate reality with our updates, so no more jokes about fire. 

Our bad.

Now on to the update.

1. Train sets have been manufactured and packed up for freight

This all happened back in mid-October. It's old news, but good news. Here are some pictures of what that looked like.

2. Asia/Pacific (APAC) backers will have their sets mailed out to them by November 20th

You lucky Asia/Pacific (APAC) backers will be the first to get your train sets as we don't need to worry about getting your goods on a container ship.

APAC backers are those backers in China and the following countries, which were listed on our Kickstarter page:

The APAC portion of the trains have arrived at our Asia fulfillment center and will be shipped out by November 20th. We haven't been able to get a firmer time than that.

Speed comes at a bit of a cost as our fulfillment center is not equipped to email individual backers once their goods have shipped. Our fulfillment center will email us a spreadsheet of tracking numbers (one for each backer) once all the sets have shipped and we will then email individual APAC backers with those tracking numbers. 

Yay! More work for us!

Because those tracking numbers won't get sent to us until the entire batch has shipped, you may receive your goods before we send you a tracking number. That should be a good thing, so please don't complain about it. We're telling you now.

But you stupid Americans, you might be thinking, Asia and the Pacific Rim include more than just these countries! I live in India/mother Russia/glorious nation of Kazakhstan, etc.--what about me?

Well, your orders are considered "rest of world" orders and will be shipped from the United States. So they'll be sent out at the same time as our U.S. orders.

I know, it sucks. But there are good logistical and pricing reasons we, and a lot of other Kickstarters, do it this way. Also, the Illuminati insist on it.

3. We received our VAT and EORI numbers for the UK

That happened, like, a week after we posted our last update. So old news, but good news. That means there won't be any shipping delay to the UK due to government bureaucracy.

4. As for US/UK/EU and Australia/New Zealand shipments...

We don't have ship information for any of you yet.

It's not that we haven't booked freight. We have. But booking freight is not a guarantee the packages will actually get on a boat.

Think of it this way. You ever been bumped on a plane flight? International freight is the same. Ships overbook cargo the same way planes overbook flights--for the same reasons. And, like passengers, cargo gets bumped when there's not enough space.

But it's not like: "Hey, who wants a voucher for another plane ticket?" It's more like, "Hey, who wants to pay us more to get on this ship today? Let's start the auction!" And the people participating in the auction are really big companies with lots more money than us.

We anticipate that your train sets will be on boats by the end of November. But it's not something we can guarantee. We could get bumped and bumped and bumped. Once we get the thumbs up that we are on an actual boat, we'll let you know.

Why do we think the end of November? 

On average, it takes about a month for cargo to make its way from China to any particular destination. That's still the case, but now there are massive port delays once the ships arrive. It takes longer for them to unload and, once unloaded, longer for the goods to be railroaded/trucked to where they need to go. 

If your goods are loaded onto a boat right now, there is a theoretical chance you could get them into a store right before Christmas. Probably not, but it's still a possibility. Accordingly, demand is super high.

As November goes on, that starts to become impossible. By the end of November, it's impossible. Christmas rush demand should end by that point, increasing our chances of getting on a boat.

Assuming the train sets ship at the end of November, we anticipate they'd arrive in port late December/early January. That means we're probably looking at January/February for fulfillment.

Yeah, it sucks. We know. But this is all out of our control.

As soon as we know the train sets are on ships, we'll let you know.

5. Some pretty pictures

We finally had some professional pictures taken of the sets. We even recreated some of the shots that we used for the renders. Below are actual pictures of the sets you will be receiving.

That's all for now. We'll end with a terrible joke.

A container walks into a bar and walks up to the counter.

The bartender says, "Sorry, we don't serve containers in here. Get lost."

Upset, the container walks out the door. Outside, he gets an idea and ties himself in a knot.

He walks back into the bar. The bartender says, "Hey, aren't you that container from before...?"

"No," says the container, "I'm a freight knot."

Until next time,

The Little Plastic Train Company

Quick update on manufacturing and shipping
over 2 years ago – Sun, Oct 03, 2021 at 12:10:30 AM

Hey everyone,

We were going to post an update in about two or three weeks once we had some final shipping news for you and had a bureaucratic issue (see part 4 below) worked out.

However, we've now learned that once a project has gone four weeks without an update, Kickstarter allows backers to submit a "Project Update Request."

In practice, this means that our inbox is getting spammed daily with messages asking us to post an update.  And we can't stop getting these emails until we post an update.

So for the sake of our inbox sanity, here's the latest!

1. Manufacturing will be complete on October 11th

All train sets will be finished and packed up for international freight by Monday, October 11th.

2. We don't yet know when the trains will ship

As for how long they'll have to sit at the factory, we're not sure.

Our logistics manager is currently working on booking container space for the trains to fulfillment warehouses in Australia, the U.S., the U.K., and France. From those warehouses, the train sets will ship out approximately 5,000 different backers.

Booking freight is not easy right now, especially for a small company like ours. We'd rather not bore you with repeating what you've probably already read dozens of time before about the nightmare that is currently global freight.

So instead, here's a metaphor in gif form:

We should have freight news for you before the end of the month. Once we know when we're likely to be on a boat, we'll have a better estimate for when you'll actually be receiving your trains.

3. We've received final production samples

We received some sets off the line this week. Below are some photos and a video so you can see what you'll be getting. We're very happy with how they've turned out.

4. Possible delay for UK backers (and a bit of a rant)

If you enjoy stories about bureaucratic absurdity, feel free to read on. Otherwise, you can just skip this part.

In order to import goods into the UK post-Brexit, foreign companies need something called an Economic Operators Registration and Identification (EORI) number issued by the UK government. They also need to register for VAT in the UK and get a separate number for that.

We knew this going into the project. Which is why, many months ago, we hired a UK accounting firm to help get us an EORI number and VAT registration number for the UK. That way, by the time we were ready to ship, everything would be set.

We knew that there were months long delays in getting these numbers, which is why we applied early.

To say that the application process has been a nightmare is an understatement. The UK's application was far more onerous than any other we've had to fill out. We were asked to submit documents no other government ever asked to see "prove" that our products existed and that we were serious about importing. The whole process seemed designed to discourage foreign companies from even bothering to ship goods into the UK.

It was particularly infuriating because we'd already collected VAT from our UK customers. It was as if the UK didn't want the money that we'd already collected for it.

By comparison, getting an EU EORI number and getting VAT registered in the EU was a breeze! Thanks, EU!

So we submitted our UK application. And we waited, and we waited, and we waited. For months, neither us nor our accountants received any updates on our application.

Finally, two weeks ago, we received a snail mail letter from the UK government, mailed from Malta(!), that informed us our application had been denied because we had "applied more than three months in advance" of our estimated import date.

You read that right. We were rejected because we applied too early. And we were informed of our rejection via snail mail from another continent--not an email.

Our accountants have informed us that there's no legal requirement that a company have to register for an EORI number within three months of an expected import date. We're talked to other publishers and no one's ever heard of this happening. It's just a strange, bureaucratic mystery--we've been rejected based on a rule or regulation whose existence no one can point us to.

So due to the incompetence of the UK government, we've had to reapply. Our accountants are working to get our new application approved as soon as possible. But until we get a UK EORI number, our UK shipments are probably going to have to sit at the factory.

Being foolishly optimistic Americans, we are hopeful that we'll get the necessary numbers and approval in the next few weeks. But until then, UK shipments may be delayed. By how long, we don't know.

We'll keep you posted.

Until next time, we remain your most faithful and obedient servant,

The Little Plastic Train Company

Important update: Last call for pledge manager surveys, locking of shipping addresses, and more news
over 2 years ago – Fri, Sep 03, 2021 at 08:22:24 PM

Hi everyone,

This is an important update so let's get straight to it.

If you have not yet received a pledge manager survey, please email [email protected] to receive one.

If you have not yet filled out your survey, please do it now.

If we do not get a pledge manager survey from you, you run the risk of never receiving your train sets.

We've received pledge manager surveys from 93% of you.

Unfortunately, that means we haven't received surveys from almost 400 of you. We've sent multiple reminder emails to everyone who has not filled out a survey. All we know is that they've been sent out and haven't bounced back as undeliverable. Whether they're getting eaten up by spam folders, we can't tell.

Kickstarter does not give us your addresses, which means it's impossible for us to know where to send your train sets without a pledge manager survey.

But we still have to make the sets and ship them all over the world, which means that in the next few weeks, we'll have to make statistical guesses about where to send unclaimed pledges. That could mean we have less stock in countries that actually need more.

Once our sets arrive in warehouses in or near their destination countries, they will be shipped out to backers and all unclaimed sets will be released for sale. We'll still keep the pledge manager open for a while to capture any last-minute suvreys, but we can't hold stock (and pay warehousing fees) for months hoping that unclaimed sets will eventually be claimed.

So please, we beg you, fill out your surveys.

Shipping addresses will be locked on September 23rd. We cannot change your shipping address after this date. 

If you are moving to a new address, please email [email protected] so we can update your address.

We have to lock shipping addresses soon so we can start the process of ordering container space. We also need to give our fulfillment partners final shipping lists. 

If you're uncertain what your address will be in the next couple of months, we suggest shipping your pledge to a friend, relative, or your workplace.  

We have started mass production!  

As we write this, your train sets are being made. We fully anticipate mass production to be finished by October.  

We'll receive some sets off the line in a couple of weeks. Once we do, we'll take some professional photos of them and post them for you to see in all their glory.  

In the meantime, here's a picture of the print that's being used to make the tins.

Once the sets have been made, we're at the mercy of the container market. Unfortunately, there's been a worrying trend of large retailers and manufacturers buying up massive amounts of containers (and in some cases entire ships) in order to secure their supply chain (and often in advance of products even being made for shipment). It's further reduced available space and has caused extreme upward price pressure that has priced out a lot of small businesses, who simply cannot ship right now. We're going to move heaven and earth to get your sets out by the end of the year (unlike some, we believe the shipping crisis is only going to get worse, not better) and will keep you posted on that front.

Wanna buy some art?

We believe that artists should be paid well for their work. When we signed our artist, Julianne Griepp, we gave her the right to merchandise the artwork she made for this project. That's not common in the industry, but we thought it only fair. Especially given how tough the pandemic has been on artists.

Julianne has created a web store in case anyone is interested in buying prints and other merchandise featuring her train artwork. We make no money from any of these sales; all proceeds go directly to Julianne.

You can find her web store here: https://www.redbubble.com/people/juliannegriepp/shop

Just click the "shop all products" link under the artwork you're interested in.

That's it, folks. Time for us to get back to stressing out!

The Little Plastic Train Company

P.S. Yes, for those of you wondering, the company personified writes these updates. It's very magical realism.