Thursday, November 09, 2006

The delay in European Shipping

More from Linae Foster on why the European shipping of Blood War was so delayed:

I've learned a little more about the situation: Although the directive from the EU Union to change to "safer" plastic has been on the books for several years now, we were not aware that we needed to make any changes to our products until sometime around April or May. I'm not sure of the exact date, and I am also not sure why we didn't get the word. By that point we were already producing Blood War.

There was a huge to-do here in order to get everything compliant. The solution: two production runs of Blood War. The first run, with the eat-three-cases-and-you-might-get-sick plastic was already in process so we decided that product would go to everyone except Europe. The second run, with the maybe-you'll-have-to-eat-five-cases-before-you-get-sick (I'm joking, of course) plastic would be for Europe. Turns out adding a second run, what with switching out plastics and basically changing gears, ate up a bunch of time and delayed the EU release date. Believe me, we don't want to ever release at different times for different markets. It is not good business.

Going forward, all production will be with the new plastic (which, BTW, is more expensive than what we had been using). We figure it'll just be a matter of time before the whole world requires the new stuff, it's time consuming to do different runs of plastic, and logistically painful to have multiple codes for the same product. We do not anticipate any further release date variances.