ALL PLEDGES SHIPPED 🥳🥳🥳
about 1 year ago – Thu, Mar 02, 2023 at 05:06:53 AM

This is my favourite part of a campaign, the time when I get to see your happy faces opening boxes! All pledges have now been sent. 

Those who added tracked shipping to their package should have received a dispatch notice from my store containing the tracking number - please shoot me a message if you haven't!

UK orders should have all arrived by now.

International tracked packages should take a week or two, please keep an eye on your tracking and send me a message if your bag does not arrive in 6 weeks.

International standard services (as mentioned in the last update) are slow at the moment, hopefully bags should arrive in a couple of weeks but it may take much longer. Please let me know if your bag has not arrived in 12 weeks. 

Thank you so much for supporting this campaign and for your patience! I hope you love your goodies and do reach out in the unlikely event that there are any problems, I'll always do my very best to help you out.

In case you need some more pins for your bags, I have a buy one get one free offer live in my store right now on full sized enamel pins and printed apparel! Do check it out 😍

https://www.pinandtonic.co.uk/

What's next? I'm planning more mini pins as well as earrings and charms for my next Kickstarter, so be sure to follow me so you're notified of my next campaigns! 

International Shipping! Opportunity to Upgrade to Tracked
about 1 year ago – Mon, Feb 06, 2023 at 09:21:28 AM

International shipping is back baby!

Royal Mail have finally announced that we can ship internationally again. Obviously where there hasn't been international shipping for over a month, there are severe delays for standard services. Tracked services have been running for a couple of weeks, so are less affected by delays. A few of you have asked if you can upgrade to tracked shipping, so I am going to give you a small window to upgrade! 

Standard shipping times: 6-12 weeks 

Tracked shipping times: 4-10 days 

As you can see, that's a biiiig difference. If you would like to upgrade to tracked shipping, please message me on Kickstarter. I will email you an invoice via my online store - it will be £9 per bag in the order.

You have until Thursday 9th!! I am planning to book a mail collection for Friday, so after this it will not be possible to upgrade as your package will be on its way. Standard shipping does not include tracking, so once it has left I will not be able to tell you where it is. 

All going to plan, bags should all be shipped this week!

Shipping Updates!
about 1 year ago – Tue, Jan 31, 2023 at 03:46:45 AM

I have made good progress this last week with shipping the bag orders! 

UK based rewards have all been sent 🥳

That's the good news. Unfortunately, due to a cyber attack on Royal Mail I cannot send any parcels internationally. This has been going on since early January, but I was hoping if I fulfilled the UK based packages first the issue would be resolved by the time I got to the international parcels. Alas, there are still issues. Improvements have been made, and it is now possible to send Tracked items internationally so my plan is to get the tracked packages sent first and hold onto the standard shipping parcels until it is possible to get them sent! I shall continue to keep you updated, hopefully it will be resolved soon. I'll prep the parcels anyway, so that as soon as it's possible I can label and send right away!

We're nearly there though guys, it's been a wild ride but turtles are finally making it into the wild 🥰

Bags Have ARRIVED! Plus Add Shop Items to Your Pledge
over 1 year ago – Mon, Jan 09, 2023 at 03:25:57 AM

The bags arrived!! Finally the stress of not knowing where they are is done. Phew.

It cost me an additional £640 to receive them from customs, please see the last update for the full story. A number of you wanted to add pins to your packages to help with this cost (thank you so much!!!) so I have created a discount code for my website that will give you free shipping and let me know that the order needs to be combined with a bag pledge.

On my website, use code Turtle Backer (case sensitive) at checkout - please include your backer number in order notes! You can find your backer number by going to the campaign home page and clicking "view pledge" at the top of the page ❤

The code will be available to use for one week, as I will start shipping bags from next Monday (16th)! There are sale prices on my store right now, these will go back to normal later today but you can still grab a bargain for a few more hours 👀

Thanks everyone! I'm excited to start getting these sent to you 😍

The Shipping Saga Continues
over 1 year ago – Tue, Jan 03, 2023 at 05:47:30 PM

So! Some good news. Some of the bags were delivered. I have 30 of 200 bags, and the remaining boxes are in the UK.

Now the bad news, due to a courier mess up, the remaining 170 bags (17 boxes worth) have been returned to customs. I am furious, as this is not my error - I was not receiving any updates from the tracking so did not know the bags were out for delivery. Before they were returned, I contacted the courier to reschedule the delivery for a day when I knew I could be in all day and they confirmed that the new delivery was set and everything would arrive on this day. Unbeknownst to me however, the customer service rep had only applied this update to one of the barcodes asociated with the consignment, it turns out that there was one main barcode which was on box number one and counted as the main tracking number for all of them but each box also had an individual barcode in case they got seperated. Had the tracking been updated correctly, it would have been applied to every box, but somewhere along the way it was only updated for this one box, so the other parcels in the shipment were just sat unaccounted from what the depot could see. At this point, you'd think that logic would kick in. There are 20 identical boxes, maybe we should check the main tracking to see if that has been updated? Alas, this is too sensible and gradually the individual cartons began to be returned to sender (which I could not see on the tracking, otherwise I'd have done something about it!!). It was lucky that the van driver on the day spotted the remaining two boxes and thought to bring them to me as well! 

What happens now? My manufacturer has been in touch and said it will be £516 to resend the bags from customs. The project doesn't have this money, it already cost an additional £1000 to ship them from China than I was originally quoted, so all of the contingency for this project has gone. I also think since this was not my error, I shouldn't have to pay for someone else's mistake! My hope is that my manufacturer will contact DPD and get them to sort it as it was their mistake, but my gut tells me the chinese manufacturer won't care since the goods aren't their problem anymore now they've been shipped... DPD won't talk to me as the receiver, they will only speak to the sender, so I'm a little stuck until my manu gets back to me. 

I will post another update once we have a resolution - if I have to pay, I have to pay, it's just how running a small business goes sometimes. If this is the case I will offer you guys the option to add an extra pin or two to your order to try and recoup some of the loss - please message me if you'd be interested in helping out in this way! I am also considering renting a van for a day to go and collect the bags myself. It's an 8 hour round trip but a lot cheaper and would avoid another courier mishap!

TL;DR - The bags will be with me as soon as the shipping situation has been worked out, I'll post again when I know when this will be!

Thanks for your patience gang, I'm sure you can appreciate how infuriating it is to have these kind of delays which are absolutely out of my control!!!