Saphira, Queen of the Skies, as imagined by Christopher Paolini himself!
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Hey gang, Bryce here. This is going to be a quick one because I want everyone to be able to read it in 2min. More information to come in the future.
Saphira and her accessories are, like 99% of the products like her, being produced in China. While Wraithmarked produces all of its books and paper products in the US and UK, producing Saphira anywhere but China would have made her cost $150-200 for the same product. With tariffs on Chinese products to us here in the US currently abruptly rising to 150%+, we need you to know several things.
FIRST: Wraithmarked will not be adding a post-campaign "tariff" fee. We know others are doing it, but don't believe in surprising our customers with additional costs like that.
SECOND: However... we may have to make some other hard decisions, with your feedback. Saphira was already a low-profit project because we wanted to make her as accessible to Christopher's audience as possible, and these tariffs are currently looking like they are going to cost us a surprise $400k USD. That... massively puts Wraithmarked in the red on this project.
We are actively discussing options with Christopher and his team, and we ask for your patience while we figure things out. But now, Saphira will NOT cost any of you more than you've already paid.
As always, you guys are amazing.
- Bryce
TLDR: Current tariffs will cost Wraithmarked an extra $400k+ on this project that we were not expecting. We are figuring out how to tank that, but we will NOT be passing that cost off on you guys.
Hey everyone!
Quick update for everyone today! While we're getting to work on the early phases of production, we wanted to take a moment to give y'all a glimpse of the final version of the Armored Saphira Bust. Take a look!
Hi all! Bryce here with some hefty news!
As of yesterday, April 2nd, we've officially locked in our quote with our production partner for the statues! We still have to do the same for the bust, but given that the statue is the big swinger on this project we wanted to make sure that ball was rolling asap!
One thing to highlight is the unit numbers: At the end of February when we pulled the statue from the late pledge store, our count was just a little shy of 11k units pledged for. On books we would do a 10% safety overage (for damaged stock, damaged in shipping, etc), but our partner could only increase the unit productions for a project this size by 1000 units at a time, so we took the safe route and ordered 13000 units. Given that this statues will never be produced again, we decided it was the safe direction to go since I would rather end up with an extra 500-1000 units rather than have to disappoint even 200 of you by not having enough undamaged units for any reason.
That DOES mean we should have a small supply of statues left over to be sold off once fulfillment is completed for your pledged rewards! So if you have friends who are bummed they missed one, you can let them know to keep an eye out next year for what is probably going to be brief availability period.
Let me know if you have any questions!
Hi everyone!
Checking in real quick here to give y'all the latest, this time it's for the boxes, which will be changing a little bit from our initial mockups. More on that below, but first, here are our current, updated plans for the boxes.
To put it simply, Saphira's wings wouldn't fit. No matter how cool we thought our initial design was, we've come to understand that if you were to use that version of the box to display Saphira as we'd intended, the angle cuts design would interfere with her wings.
Still, as you can see in the image above, we still very much want the box to be an awesome display piece. So even though we're still tinkering with this design, it's always going to look great on your shelf.
Now that we've officially stopped accepting new orders for the main Saphira figurine we'll be able to lock down our final order quantities and start moving forward with production. As we get word on each of those steps, we'll let y'all know!
Also, as a reminder, even though the Saphira figurine is no longer available, you can still grab the bust if that's something you want to add!
If you require assistance with your pledge, need to change your shipping info, or have another question, please send an email to [email protected]. We’re open Monday-Friday, 8am-4pm EST and will be happy to help however we can (it usually takes 3 to 5 business days to get back to you, but we do answer all tickets in need of a response). So you are aware, if you message us here on Kickstarter, we'll reply asking you to send your request to our email.