An important update on outstanding orders + our new shipping partner
Hi all, and Happy New Year! As we head into 2025, we’re excited to be moving ahead with more incredible launches across our unannounced book, vinyl, and other upcoming physical goods projects.
We’re equally (if not more) excited to continue getting items into your hands. It’s certainly no secret that 2024 tested our mettle, in terms of our previously communicated distribution issues. While we are very pleased to have fixed this issue, the arduous process of moving stock, orders, and shipments over to our new, much more reliable shipping partner is still ongoing.
As we are understandably seeing tickets and social media comments requesting updates on shipments that have still not arrived, and we promised transparency late last year too, we wanted to update you on where the situation is now.
To be clear, it is good news, and things are on the way, but we are aware how delayed some items are, and want to give you some timelines, reassurances, and insights on where we are currently at.
A large percentage of stock has been moved from our previous distribution partner over to our new, much more reliable partner. This is a jump we wish we had made sooner, as the difference we’re seeing from visiting their warehouse in person is night and day. Some of you may have seen they have started shipping back orders already.
We had hoped all outstanding order shipments would be sorted by now, for a clean slate in 2025. While we were finishing agreements with our distributor and preparing to ship all outstanding stock to them, in order to hurry along shipments in the meantime, we were told by our previous distributor they would still send UK and EU orders as a matter of urgency. This is why we communicated to you at the time that these orders were not as severely impacted.
However, when we sent the stock from the UK to their warehouse in the EU, they then expressed they could not ship it. A lack of communication from them has made giving concrete dates difficult. We requested for the stock to be sent back once again, but as it arrived back in disorganised pallets, this meant even more manual work to assign orders to items, and a lot of extra costs we have of course absorbed. If our distributor had fulfilled their commitments, every outstanding order would have already shipped before Christmas. Alas, they did not - we’re sorry that you took the brunt of that.
At the same time, a new European law came into effect at the time of transitioning distributors, which meant every company has to abide to new health and safety legislation and have an assigned responsible economic operator to sign off on shipments from the UK into Europe, which we had to handle with our small team whilst handling the distribution issues, changeover, and ensuring we have an automated service going forward to avoid manual processing of orders and delays. The sorts of issues larger companies than ours deal with over years, we’ve had to handle all at once in the span of three months.
None of this is to say we are passing the buck - it’s us you gave your money to, us you have an order with, so we completely understand it’s our responsibility - and we’re a small, passionate team, not a capitalistic mega-corp, so having our work in your hands is genuinely important to us, as creators as much as a business. We’ve all bought stuff from other companies and got annoyed by delays ourselves, so it’s mortifying to be on the other end of it. The previous distributor issues have been… a headache, that’s for sure, but we know it’s our job to fix it and deliver your packages.
You may have spoken to Athena before if you’ve ever interacted with our customer service email, or our Discord. Please send her your warmest regards; with some help from Rozie and others, she has been working tirelessly, between sourcing a new distribution partner, to resolving tickets, to manually processing thousands of orders and shipments. She is a star. ❤️
We wanted to lay down some explanations, but thankfully, rest assured the issue is already resolved, and it is not a new, or repeated issue. The hold up is just us dealing with the transition. Apologies again for the delays. We have such exciting projects lined up in 2025, and we know they can only exist with your faith and support. It’s truly our highest personal and business priority for you to receive your item ASAP.
So, here are the next steps and timings:
This applies to all outstanding orders of in stock items waiting to ship, including Citizen Sleeper: DW, Cycles of the Eye, The Console Chronicles, A Handheld History + 88-95, Sable: DW, MANSION, and Heterotopias.
1,800 orders were outstanding to ship, with 1000s already previously shipped. If you are receiving this email, this applies to one of your items.
14% of the remaining backlogged orders shipped this week, and we expect 29% to be shipped by end of Monday. 100s of items will be manually sorted, processed and shipped every day to fulfil the remaining orders with this cadence. We expect to have 100% shipped within two weeks or sooner.
For UK, US, and rest of the world (excluding Europe) - all outstanding orders will ship between January 16th and January 31st. This has already begun, as we waited to send this email out until we knew it had started without any further issues.
For EU - all outstanding orders will ship between January 21st and January 31st. This slight delay in shipment compared to the above is due to the additional requirement of needing GPRS numbers for our tax tracking.
We will be updating this page on our production blog every few days with any minor updates, and the most up-to-date percentage of outstanding orders shipped. These won’t be massive updates, but we want to be fully transparent in keeping you in the loop on this last part of the process.
We’ll also be providing more frequent updates on all other ongoing projects under pre-order. These might not always be the biggest or most exciting updates, but it’ll keep you informed of the process and progress.
We will email you when we believe this entire shipping backlog process is complete, at the end of January. If you are still waiting on an order to arrive after mid-February, let us know at team@lostincult.co.uk, as we would expect all outstanding orders to have been delivered by then.
UPDATE (as of January 17th):
14% of the remaining backlogged orders have shipped this week. We expect another 15% to have shipped by the end of Monday. We will update this page then!
UPDATE (as of January 20th):
We've been pleased by how efficient our new partner has been, meaning this big, final push in getting outstanding orders out is on track with our above targets. We're also making strides this week to focus on ensuring we have a firm API in place with them, to help avoid any future issues with new orders.
We expect to have shipped almost another 10% of the above outstanding orders by the end of today, accounting for several hundred items being shipped.
The slight decrease in what we said we expected to ship today in our previous update is due to sorting the next batch (roughly 40% of remaining orders) for processing this week. We expect to maintain this cadence and have all outstanding orders shipped by January 31st, as we'd hoped in our initial update above. We'll update again in a few days.
