CREO + HermitCraft TCG S1 | Manufacturing Update 3 - Shipping Marathon

Published: Nov 12, 2023

After 2+ weeks, 35+ people, 24/7 warehouse shifts, and approximately 100 gallons of coffee we have (almost) every single shipment in the mail!

The Short Version:
96% of shipments are in the mail as of today, Sun Nov 12, 2023

If you’re in the final 4% and haven’t gotten a shipping confirmation email in the next 24 hours, please allow us just a few more days to get your orders out. Hoping for end of day Monday at the latest.

Shipping Confirmation emails will be sent out in the next 24 hours

Tracking Numbers may not update for several days (expected behaviour with this volume of shipments - does not mean your package is not already on the way)

July Collector’s Edition cards are on track to be delivered before Christmas!

The Long Version:
Whew. What a few weeks it has been since the last time I reached out! A whirlwind of a thousand tiny things going wrong, fended off one-by-one by an incredible team of people working insanely hard to get these orders shipped as fast as possible.

Here’s a few of things we’ve been working through, and learning on the fly, over the past few weeks.

Bubble Wrap is a Trap

In a previous update I mentioned that because of a concern around excess space in our mailers, we had placed a last minute order for Bubble Wrap to prevent smaller orders from rattling around inside the mailer. This is what it looked like having the Bubble Wrap inside the box:

While this worked well, it was quite time consuming, pretty expensive, and from an environmental perspective I didn’t love the amount of plastic waste.

After doing some additional research, Amy (CREO’s COO) found a much better alternative. It turns out the industry term for what we needed is “Void Fill”, which is meant to fill empty space in boxes. Generally, Void Fill is just sheets of scrap paper that are recyclable, cheaper, and much easier/faster to actually put in a box! Crumpling up the paper takes less than half the time than using the bubble wrap.

Best of all, it actually functionally works better too. In hindsight, it makes sense that this is the best option as this is what Amazon always uses for Void Filler.

Zippers and Tape

I worked with Sevenchi to design custom mailer boxes to ship out the product in, and they turned out ridiculously cool. I specifically chose a “Zipper Carton” style package, which has a pull-tab which feels incredibly satisfying to pull open.

However, nothing’s ever easy and we discovered an issue. When putting weight on the top of the box at just the right angle, the zipper has the potential to break open on its own. And because the box is assembled using internal self-adhesive strips, a worst case scenario would be the box completely opening mid-transit, revealing its precious contents to the cruel outer world!

I really wanted the clean aesthetic of having no tape on the exterior of the box, but made the call to compromise and add a single piece of tape across the zipper as a fail-safe.

If you’d still like to get the experience of pulling the zipper tab open, which tickles all the right places inside my brain, please just carefully cut the tape at each end of the box, before pulling to open!

After we figured out how to pack and seal the boxes, we wrapped them on pallets using this fancy dancy spinny pallet wrapper! I took a quick video because I thought y’all might think was neat.

And with that, we take these pallets of orders over to our Shipping Carriers!

An important note - with this volume of orders being dropped off all at once, it’s possible that the shipping carriers may miss the ‘Entry Scan’ when getting the shipments into the mailstream.

The bad news - your tracking number in the email confirmation may show as “Tracking Number not Found”, or it may not update until it gets received by the next stage of the carrier supply chain.

The good news - this doesn’t affect the speed at which you’ll get your order. Almost all of you have your package on the way, and I’m expecting the majority of the shipments to be delivered by mid-week (if you’re in central US) and end of week (if you’re far from Canada, like California).

As always, please leave a comment and tell me what you think (: My favourite part of writing these updates is reading your replies.

Sincerely,

- Luke Chesney

Founder, CREO