Shipping is complete! Final update
over 4 years ago
– Sun, Nov 03, 2019 at 12:46:13 AM
We did it! I just put the shipping label on the last pledge to leave the studio. The amount of relief I feel can't be explained. I want each and every one of you to know how grateful I am and how much your support has meant to us getting off the ground. Yes, it took longer than originally expected - between all the set backs and unexpected problems that arose I believe it only added to my determination to see this through. Most of you were understanding, your kind words and thoughts really did help make this an easier task. All in all I would say we learned a lot from our first experience here at Kickstarter. Couple things I wanted to throw out there.
704 packages in total shipped to over 40 countries. Keep in mind each package was hand packed by us here, you may have noticed some of your packing materials were even comic books...when you run out of packing peanuts you use what ever you can! When I started this I never imagined that we would get support from all around the world like we did.
Tracking info - it seems that the great spam folder swallowed up the majority of the tracking info emails - please check your spam folder! If you still don't have one please EMAIL me at [email protected] W will get it to you.
International orders - looks like it is taking between 10-30 days for some of you to get your packages. IF you have to pay additional taxes when you pick yours up please email me at [email protected] - we were told that there would be no additional fee's for these boxes at our local post office. I will work with you to get that money back but we will need copies of receipts for the taxes.
138,705 individual bottles of paint / wash...holy cow... the first 63000 bottles went off without a problem...then machines broke down... our mixers were great, the bottling machine - quit the latter. The remaining bottles of paint and washes (75kish) were all done by hand...filled and capped. And each and every single label was applied by hand as well - our label application machine didn't even make it through the first 100 bottles. We learned from our mistakes here, and paid for it trust me. I want to thank my family (wife and kids) as well as my studio partners for all the long hours and hard work they put in to make this happen, every day after work from 6pm to 1am was spent working on bottling and labeling. Weekends - easily 16 hours a day - for the last 4 months. Thats a lot of time...814 man hours that were tracked - not counting the hours that we "were just going to work for a little bit".
Lastly - financials...we raised just over 30k for this project, and that is a great deal of money!!! Congrats to all of you for making that possible. Our final tally was at $38,537 to complete the process. Between breaking equipment, the huge disaster that was our labels and art and the shipping charges being massively over budget we just didn't have enough money after all the fee's were paid to kickstarter and backerkit. My wife and i talked about it and decided that since this was such a big deal to me, and a dream of mine that we would foot the bill for the rest. Sadly, as she reminds me daily...this means I won't be spending anytime on a warm sunny beach for vacation relatively soon.
Lastly - If you are missing / have a damaged item in your pledge please email me at [email protected]. I don't get to check on the comments section on kickstarter very often - but have my email on me at all times and can usually get back to you right away.
Again, thank you from the bottom of my heart - this would never of been possible without all of you helping make this dream come true. We will have a shopify store front going live within a week - I'll post an update when we do. So if you missed out on any of the Cuttlefish Colors action you'll be able to get your paints soon!
- Ryan
