We're scaling our fulfilment!

Many of you will know the story of Peregrine Coast Press - Eryk started a project to make Filmmakers Without Cameras over lockdown and I helped him ship it. Eventually Swag/Ship/Hack became part of the Press when Harry, Syd and I joined to work together, as a co-operative company with Eryk.

We’ve shipped loads of stuff, from the now award winning Lost in Cult through to all the awesome creators starting out during Zine Month. But we’ve also struggled to scale internally.

At the Press a key manifesto commitment is that we support smaller publications, folks just starting out and marginalised communities. That isn’t changing ❤️

However, we are going to be outsourcing warehousing & fulfilment to a specialist logistics company who, honestly, can do it better than we can.

So why are we doing this?

😫 Shipping has started to take up a lot of time and energy, and led to burnout

📈 We’ve reached a point where we’d need to scale fulfilment by a lot to make this work. We don’t think that’s sustainable for us right now.

🤝 We want to concentrate on working with other creators and publishers to get their work on there, and provide better support throughout the production & fulfilment process.

With projects like Sidekick coming up fast doing everything in house started to become unmanageable 😵‍💫

In future, we want to use the headspace we gain to support more options for creators - like calculating and collecting EU taxes and getting a good process to automate things like backer data 🤖

Working with creators from across the globe is really important to us - we love bringing projects to life, being exposed to cool zines we can stock long term and meeting awesome folks 🙌 By working with us you help the Press bring down the cost and accessibility of fulfilment for everyone we work with, especially smaller creators.

What options did you consider?

We did look at doing a big scale up, renting proper space and potentially hiring people to help with the work.

Unfortunately with everyone having other jobs that actually pay the bills, there isn’t enough time we can commit to making a really good go of it. We’d like to come back when we have grown into our own space and consider whether we can make it work again.

The other option was that we stop doing external fulfilment entirely which we felt was a worse outcome 😢

What changes?

It’s important that we continue to offer the range of options and flexibility and that’s something we’ve kept in mind when choosing who we work with.

Our pricing will be changing; upwards, unfortunately. We’ve negotiated hard to keep this down, but we’ve never run fulfilment intending to scalp people so our ability to absorb rises is small. Our current estimates are as follows:

Untracked

Tracked

As you’ll see, the weightbands have changed slightly and we’re adjusting the rest of our pricing table to make it simpler for everyone. This isn’t code for ‘more expensive’ - some things like storage will get cheaper and simpler to calculate.

For items sold through our store or on consignment we’re able to offer (marginally) better rates to customers, as we absorb some of the shipping costs elsewhere.

What next?

We’re working on sorting out integrations and getting our stock transferred across throughout June, after UKGE. Some store orders or small fulfilment projects (for example, MIIRU) will ship via our partner early on.

Our finalised pricing and docs will be available at the end of June.

If you’re a fulfilment customer with agreed rates we’ve hopefully contacted you already to discuss this. There are a few projects in the works which have charged shipping already and we’ll work with those to either ship in house, or find another arrangement.

We anticipate that we’ll be fully switched over by July.