Primal Series 2 is Live on Kickstarter
about 2 months ago
– Sun, Mar 10, 2024 at 05:30:40 PM
Good Evening Tribe!
We wanted to let everyone know that the Primal Series 2 Kickstarter is live and we already made goal!
This new campaign offers FOUR brand new body types as well as armybuilder and champion stretch goal figures, and FOUR brand new weapon sets that are sure to knock your socks off. so head on over now and check out what we have to offer!
Click Here: Primal Series 2 Link
As always thank you all so much for your amazing support.
Love Spero!
Jason
We've been very busy!
7 months ago
– Fri, Oct 06, 2023 at 04:55:11 PM
Hello Tribe, it's Adam Drake
Let me start by saying that it has been my utmost pleasure to be able to help everyone get their orders sorted out. Although this post may come too late for some customers, I hope that sharing my experience may shed some light on the difficulties and delays that Jason and Spero Toys have experienced during the rollout of the Primal Series figures...
I was a customer before Jason and I became friends. My order was delayed because I'm in Canada. In chats with Jason about some of the issues he was having with shipping and stuff, I very quickly realized that Jason was NOT equipped to manage everything on his own. I offered to help in any way I could. He didn't take me up on the offer right away (which was probably his biggest mistake.) It wasn't until Jason was already absolutely overwhelmed that I suggested, or maybe insisted, that I take on some of the customer services. Jason's mind is a creative one, and managing and organizing everything was becoming too much. Messages were coming from Facebook, Twitter, email - every mode of communication - and it was impossible for him to navigate all of that and still have time to ship anything out. It was at this time that the '[email protected]' email was set up, and I was immediately on board.
I will point out that I don't work for Spero Toys - I'm doing this for free, as a favor to a friend, for a toy line and comic book that I LOVE. On top of that, I'm working remotely. My hope was that my help with the logistical stuff would free Jason up to do the creative stuff that he's so good at. As soon as I started answering the emails, I realized there was a LOT of work to be done. In my head, I thought we were looking at 50-100 issues, and I naively thought it might take a couple of weeks. Within the first 2 days, I realized that was not the case. Emails kept coming in, and I kept compiling them into a spreadsheet. As the spreadsheet got longer, it also had to become more organized, and by the end, it was a 6-sheet Excel spreadsheet with color coordination. It has been a MASSIVE undertaking.
The 'list' is long. We dealt with somewhere in the range of 500 orders that needed to be fixed - missing items, missing orders, incorrect items, short items, extra items, incomplete addresses, orders that were never finalized in the Backerkit, items that didn't map correctly from the Backerkit to Shopify... Hundreds of hours were spent replying to thousands of emails. I was thrown in the deep end. I gave the best answers I could with the information I had. As the issues and errors started stacking up, I had to 'level up' my involvement. Initially, I was just replying to emails without any access to the site or the store, but I quickly realized that just wasn't going to work, because It was way too much work to go back and forth with Jason on every order. I was compiling all relevant information into lists, and sending those lists to Jason to pull, pack, and ship, but I had to get into the orders and reference the Backerkit and Kickstarter for some issues. I should mention too that although Jason had a few days of help to pack some of wave 1, and a few days of help for wave 2, the Spero Toys staff was a grand total of 1 person - Jason. In the last couple of months, while we were working to fix these issues, Jason brought on a couple more awesome people to help, and it's down to the extra employees that we got everything done.
For all intents and purposes, we're finally all caught up. There are still a couple of outstanding issues, and there are still struggles. Jason is still learning, and I'm still trying to do anything I can to help. There are great things on the horizon, and I'm excited for what's to come. I still love AWOK and the world that Jason is building with this IP, and I want to see it thrive. I want to thank everyone for their patience with me, with Jason, and with Spero. Upwards and onwards! I think you guys are going to like what's coming next...
Best Regards, Adam
Growing Pains...
8 months ago
– Mon, Sep 11, 2023 at 08:16:22 AM
Good Morning Tribe!
Jason here, I wanted to take a minute and fill everyone in on what has been going on, on the back end of fufilment and order issues.
First I want to say that we hear you, we care about you and we appreciate you all so much! We have a certain set of challenges that have been a combination of factors that a both in our control and out of our control. We are working very hard and have made great progress on all fronts but one and that is being more vocal and frequent on progress and resolution on these issues. That is my responsibility and I will be making time in work schedule to keep fans and customers up to date on these issues at least once a week until the Kickstarter and older orders have been resolved!
Side Note: my personal and business Facebook was hacked which has made an additional challenge in keeping everyone informed. I will get access and then it is revoked every 3 days or so. However Eddie as well as other team members will be relying information through Facebook, I still thankfully have access to Instagram but that is more of a visual platform. I am in the process of setting up a more permanent filming background for video updates and podcasts.
Challenges and issues we are working on.
- Double orders for Kickstarter
- When I intergated orders from backerkit to shopify I must have done it incorrectly which caused it to create duplicate orders.
- Must of these issues have been taken care of and those orders are in the pull lists to be packed and shipped.
- Duplicate orders
- Duplicate orders are being created by staff. We realized that customers where reaching out to myself, and Adam as well as other team member via social media messages. This results in duplicate orders being created as the responses weren't going through offical channels and instead are going through personal social media pages.
- While we absolutely want to get everyone taken care of ASAP we ask that everyone please be patient and follow the official contact via [email protected]
- This allows us to stay organized and know that the customer has been addressed and helped and that it is safe to create an order>pack sheet>shipping label.
- Late orders
- We are having intense "Growing Pains" we are both very happy that the toyline is so popular and very sought after. That beging said we werent ready with the inferstructor needed to handle such high volumes of orders.
- We have added two fufilment crew members as well as myself (morning) to make sure we are getting large amounts of orders packed and shipped each day.
- However we still are struggling to keep up. That is our issue (not the customers) we thank you and will be adding on more fufilment staff.
- 5 Days to process orders and ship
- Our goal is to process orders (approved, print pack labels/shipping labels, pack and ship orders in 5 days)
- We are about 75% of the way to that goal. With such high volumes and older orders we have been putting in overtime to catch up and stay on that 5 day goal.
- Adam did discover an issue when reviewing how we could get up to that volume.
- Whenever we batch and print packlist and shipping labels we set the ship date at two to three days from the time we ship the label on order to get those items packaged and shipped on 5 days. However we have been printing the packlist on a way that over road that and tells the customer and fufilment system that the order is being shipped the day we print the labels which is not accurate.
- We have already fed and addressed that issue but we feel it is very important that everyone knows what was going on, on the back end of fufilment.
- The USPS challenge.
- I've personally spoken to post master around the country about the issues we are having with getting USPS to pick up our packages in a timely manner.
- It's a real kick to our moral to be working this hard only to have USPS constantly refusing to pick up orders, loose orders and even in some cases refuse to let us drop off those orders at our assigned post office destination.
- One of my close friends who works for the post office in the county next to use informared is that our county lost it's postmaster and it has been "anarchy" I confirmed that that is the case.
- I personally contacted our state congressmen order to get this resolved and we are confident that this is the breakthrough we needed in this important link of the fufilment process.
Again I want to let everyone know we hear your frustrations and are greatful for you support and patients in our new baby company who has grown into a giant beast in a very short time ha! We will get all these challenges figured out and are going to close the online store this week in order to sort and ship these outstanding orders as well as take time to do inventory.
Thank you all so very much!
Love Spero
Jason Bienvenu
Managing Partner, and Art Director
