Note: If you have an outstanding order and are located in the EU please be sure to read the note at the very bottom of this update!
Our team is currently working on a long-term sustainable solution for the issues that have plagued us thus far. We are also working to triage the existing situation with unfulfilled orders. I’d like to not only take a moment to spell out what the plans for those parallel issues are, but also take the opportunity to express some accountability and understanding.
I am incredibly grateful to have recently been able to attend the 2024 World Championship in San Francisco. While I was there, a number of community members told me they felt left in the dark about what NSG has been doing to resolve things. I understand that Distribution failing to deliver impacts the public perception of our entire organization negatively. We want you to have our cards, we obviously want you to play with them, and we want you to appreciate the art, the design, and the stories we tell through those cards. We want you to be able to do that regardless of where you are in the world. Distribution not being able to follow through on our promises is not acceptable, and we are working hard to do better. Distribution is one of the smallest teams in NSG and in a lot of cases we have to choose between dedicating time to communicating what we’re doing OR dedicating time towards actually doing it.
The good news is that we’ve managed to free up some bandwidth and come up with an actionable plan. This means we will be able to continue working towards a long term resolution, and hopefully also be able to communicate our progress better.
The Plan
While this update today is mostly focused around the larger effort involving the EU, we are also working on resolving the situation in the UK in parallel. We are unraveling the ball of yarn which EU Distribution has become, and that is already freeing up bandwidth internally to get the UK issues addressed. Bandwidth is the main obstacle currently.
Restructuring Distribution
It is fairly unusual for board game companies to rely solely on a direct-to-consumer model. While some smaller companies embrace this model, it is much more common to have a multifaceted approach where they work with third party fulfillment and distribution partners to handle the warehousing and shipping of their games. This is the model which we are currently pursuing; however, setting up meetings and calls with these international companies can be quite time consuming, and doing our due diligence will take time. Now that Worlds is behind us we are hoping to temporarily shift resources in terms of volunteer labor in order to get this right.
We are going to begin by focusing these efforts on the EU followed by the UK. My goal is to have both of these systems (fulfillment partners) in place by mid-February 2025, less than four months from now. The US & Canada will follow and we hope to explore options in other regions as well.
Triage
In the meantime, we are also working to find a temporary solution where we can work through our backlog of European orders and possibly re-open the online store. This involves establishing a new temporary shipping hub in the region and getting products to that hub. However, to temper expectations, this suffers from the same potential points of failure as our existing distribution structure.
That said, we’ve started establishing a temporary shipping hub in Germany and all existing orders will be shipped from there. We’re doing a test run this week with getting orders out through an email list which was gathered at Essen. Once we work out any kinks in the system, we will resume work on the outstanding store orders. This extra moment of pause between establishing the German hub and working on the backlog also allows us to clean up some of the database in a way which will help streamline the upcoming work. Resuming work on the backlog is a big milestone for Distribution. In order to allow us to catch up with pending orders, the EU store will close immediately.
As we work through the backlog, we will start off by fulfilling as many orders containing similar items as possible rather than go chronologically. This is for two reasons:
- product availability is an issue and we are working with what we have on hand to completely fill orders until more product arrives
- volunteer labor hours are in short supply and very valuable, and this approach will enable us to put those hours to the best use possible and allow for ALL orders to be fulfilled sooner.
Part of the preparation for this effort will be validating addresses for existing orders, combining multiple orders, canceling incorrect tracking numbers, etc. During this process you may see automated updates to your orders, so please don’t be concerned. You can proactively contact us at support@nullsignal.games to inform us of any address changes, ask any questions, or, if you wish, to cancel your order and request a refund.
