Production, Fulfillment, and Other Boring Updates.

The photo above is of one of the latest deliveries into Sarissa of UK-made plastic frames. We now have four mold bases in place in the UK (two large ones that produce 151mm x 223mm frames and two small ones that produce our new 113mm x 151mm frames). Two more large mold bases are arriving in the UK next week (fun fact - it costs more to ship them than to build them - such is the state of international trade these days!)

Sarissa team working hard!

I wanted to take this Labor Day weekend (here in the USA and also celebrated by our neighbor to the north on the first Monday of September - the rest of you celebrate May Day) to give some general updates on where things are with our new way of operating. 

In general things are going smoothly. International shipments (as I'm sure you've seen from the many, many posts on Facebook and announcements by other companies in the wargames world) has been turned upside down because of ongoing USA tariff chaos. This has a knock on effect to DHL, UPS, and FedEx as they take on more shipments that might have gone through regular national postal systems. This is primarily effecting shipments into and out of the US. For example a shipment of our molds from the UK to the US (picked up in the UK on the 14th is still in customs limbo as of today). Usually these would have been door to door in about 4-5 days. 

That's a chonky boy.

Also in the UK we are going to be taking a much larger warehouse space with Sarissa. Currently Sarissa house our products in a smaller unit near their own space, bringing over loose plastic and boxes to build product boxes as needed and keeping a small inventory in stock for shipping on premises. This new space will be about 3x the size of the existing area and allow Sarissa to box much more product as plastic arrives and have room to keep it all. This should also speed up turnaround of shipments going forward. 

We have another batch of molds sitting ready to ship over to the US but are holding fire until this one arrives safe and sound and DHL can tell us that our account is pre-approved for future shipments with all the ancillary forms filed and approved. Papers please!

Here in the US we've also made a quite large change. After six years we've moved our warehouse. We've (hopefully!) done it in such a way to cause minimal disruption for you and most of you wouldn't notice it was happening as we started shipping from the new location while the old location wrapped up and multiple semi trailers of products moved over. The last of those arrived this week and the team is almost done inventorying it all while shipping as many orders as they can each day. 

We're very happy to announce that Griffon will be handling all our warehousing and fulfillment in the US going forward. Located in Erie, Pennsylvania, the new warehouse is more centrally located and we expect your shipping experience will be much faster than what you've experienced with us in the past. 

While all this has been going on, Andy Hobday has been hard at work behind the scenes going back to his roots. Many of you know Andy as the rules meister extraordinaire, but in his former lifetime he was the self-titled IT God at Games Workshop. So along with his Creative Director job he's been helping to upgrade our information systems. Part of that has been a quite large inventory management project that tracks not only how many of each product is available, but also every loose plastic frame, printed boxes, components like the various dice, shield decal sheets, token sheets, etc. organized across four locations in the US and UK. This system will be going live in the next week or so and will allow us to more accurately forecast when to do restocks, how many of each new product should be printed/injected/etc. on launch, etc. 

Personally (Hudson) I'm very much looking forward to this as component tracking especially has been handled through multiple spreadsheets and product inventory through two different software systems. This will put it all under one roof and give me a much better bird's eye view of our operation and tell me when to get molds running and boxes reprinted faster than in the past. This is especially important as we're now juggling almost 150 molds between our own and outsource customers and about to crack 100+ individual products. 

Knock on wood all inventory from all locations should be updated in the next few days and we'll be able to reassess which restocks should be moved up the queue. We currently have several in process (as we always do). I want to end this long, rambling update with some specific updates on specific products/ranges: 

Barons' War Updates - BW2 continues to be extraordinarily popular and we are scrambling on the next restock. We thought the original box was a bit too tight so we've gone with a larger version (which is in-house in the UK now), more dice arrive this week, and we're reprinting the tokens. As a stop gap measure Steve @ Sarissa has kindly made some MDF versions of the tokens to add into games as needed until the new printed ones arrive with us. With the new large mold bases arriving in the UK we will be doing another run of BW plastics before sending the molds back over to the US to restock the game on this side of the pond. 

Heiho Update - the final run of plastic is wrapping up in the US and we are shipping the molds over to the UK. All other components are ready to go. 

Restock Updates - most sets are in stock. Guards and Villagers are out in the US waiting for those molds to ship over in the next batch. The boxes have already been reprinted and are waiting to be filled. We are fully in stock in the UK. Grognards are also back in the UK this week. We are doing something new with our system (thanks again to Andy) and when a product is out of stock we add it to the Release Schedule page but we also flip a switch to make it unavailable to order (and unviewable) to customers serviced by the warehouse where it is out of stock. So right now everyone in the world except for US-based customers can see and order the Guards and Villagers but no one here can. This will save a lot of angst for people who end up waiting longer than they expected for an order that was out of stock when they placed the order. If in doubt check the Release Schedule page!

New Product Updates: Satyrs and the Dwarven Host are now shipping from the UK warehouse. Satyrs were already out in the US one. The Dwarven Host and Civilians/Survivors molds are ones that are waiting on customs in the US so we'll have those out to everyone as soon as we get them. Civilians/Survivors will start shipping to the rest of the world next week. Once this customs/shipping mess is sorted we'll have enough time between pre-order and release date that they will always be in both places at the start. Richard Sharpe is produced waiting for boxes in the UK, mold is with US customs. (And Harper is almost off to tooling!)

Death Fields Arena Updates: we are blown away by all your feedback and hard work playtesting these rules. You've helped Andy identify several areas for improvement, streamlining, and overall more awesomeness - so thank you! As he wraps up his current project and hangs up his IT hardhat to put on his Creative Director fedora, we will have the next version ready to share with you. In the meantime, the plastics engines are churning out Arena terrain and new teams! 

Classic Fantasy Battles Updates: as you'll have seen the Boneblades were released for pre-order today. (Another mold in limbo) These have everything needed to go in the UK, boxes are en route to the US, and as soon as we get the mold released we'll be able to run the plastic here. Many more sets are in some stage of design, file prep, layout, tooling, or box design and we will continue to roll out new unit boxes like the Boneblades in the run up to the game release. Andy continues to refine the rules and there has been a lot of playtesting behind the scenes here. We're loving it. More to come as we have it!

Other Games and Hard Plastic Sets and Products Oh My!

Work continues at a frenetic pace on all sorts of new products that may or may not be on the Release Schedule page! In no particular order: 

Leuthen Game - Henry Hyde has been hard at work on his Grand Battle Scale Seven Years' War game focused on the Battle of Leuthen. We'll have frames of hard plastic 10mm Austrians and Prussians for this one. 

Additions to ranges - besides ongoing Death Fields and Classic Fantasy Battles new hard plastics, we currently have new sets for every range we make. And that goes double for the Quar which have a whopping 13 new hard plastic sets in development. 

We're especially excited for the first of the Warring States sets and we can't wait to announce a special partnership that will greatly enhance our Napoleonics offering. The new Barons' War set is off the hook as well. 

And finally, The Damned (besides that troublesome Heavy Infantry mold) are all produced in the US and in the warehouse - the other molds are in the UK. Once we have the new mold bases on line in the UK we'll begin production there and be able to bang through that fairly quickly (knock on wood barring any more issues which this little project seems to attract). A couple things (besides the Heavy Infantry mold) held us back on this one. #1 we wanted to make the switch to the new warehouse and Griffons' fulfillment to ensure the project went smoothly at the delivery stage and #2 Andy (again poor Andy!) has had to put together a new Shopify store exclusively for The Damned so that the crazy volume and configuration of all those loose frames can be shipped correctly from the two warehouses. It's simply too confusing to do it with spreadsheets. This work is happening now as he wraps up the inventory management project. In any event, backers will start seeing their orders shipping out in the not so distant future and we can get to see some Damned in the wild! (And then the rest of you will have a chance to get your own grubby mitts on some too!)

Onward!