Hey everyone!
We’re so excited to launch our new Dragon Age: The Veilguard collection on November 1st at 11 AM PT.
Many of our products are still in the pre-production stage, meaning we’re still actively developing them with BioWare and our manufacturers to make them the best they can be!
Because of this, we’re making the items closest to the finish line of that development process available for preorder. For these items, you’ll order the item like anything else currently available on our website, but we’ll ship it out to you when it’s ready.
Fan in the Back of the Panel Room, Understandably: Why don’t you just wait until the products are ordered and at your warehouse to release them?
Making products on your own can be challenging. Making products under a license has even more layers of approval, making production times longer.
We started talking about this deal with BioWare back in April 2023, signed the deal in October 2023, and started actively developing product in February 2024 after BioWare reviewed our initial, top-line plans for our first collection. The gap between October 2023 and February 2024 is due to holiday closures and the time it took to generate first submission concepts for each approved product from our line plan.
So now we’re approaching Veilguard’s release, and this is where we’re at in the process.
We want to make sure that fans see our stuff when the game releases, because typically that’s when fandom is most engaged.
We’re so proud of the work we’ve put into these items (and there are others we’re excited to talk about soon!), and so we want to do everything we can to get as many fans to order as possible.
This also helps costs as a small business. If we didn’t do preorders, we’d have to guess what the demand for our products would be and then pay for manufacturing costs up front. If we’re wrong in our estimate of the demand in either direction (we didn’t make enough; we made too many), then we have challenges to navigate.
By doing preorders, we can order exactly as much as fans want, plus additional stock to sell later–this helps get our cost per unit down and makes it so we’re sustainable (did you know 80% of childrens’ toys end up landfills? We uh…do not want to contribute to that statistic, even if these aren’t children’s toys 😬).
Fan in the Back of the Panel Room, Still Understandably: Um…ok, but how will we know WHEN we’re going to get what we ordered?
Great question!
We’re aiming for the products launching with the release of Dragon Age: The Veilguard to arrive at our warehouse and then shipped out sometime in Q2 2025.
Fan in the Back of the Panel Room, Even More Understandably: That doesn’t seem really specific?
True.
It’s a pretty wide range of time (April, May, or June 2025), because we want to wait to ship all the preorder items out once all products have arrived to our warehouse (seriously, no one wants these items individually shipped–costs, logistics…it’d be a nightmare!).
This is because things come up in the manufacturing process we can’t account for–sometimes our manufacturer will need to pivot on a construction method, sometimes there are unexpected delays in the shipping process.
(Suez Canal, I stg, PLS stay unblocked this time)
Some things may ship before that time window, others may ship after!
Here’s our plan, because it sucks not knowing where things are in the process:
- Once the preorder window closes on December 6th, we will send out an email to everyone who ordered a preorder product confirming that you consent to receiving updates about the status of these items.
- Every month, starting in January 2025 when we’re back in the office (yes, we take a pretty long break from mid-December to January because we are…so tired… [and, you know, to play Dragon Age: The Veilguard multiple times–for research! very necessary research!]), we’ll send an email and make a blog post chronicling the progress of each of the preorder items.
- We’ll continue to send monthly updates until all the products in this collection have shipped!
This is the first time Dual Wield Studio is doing a preorder program at this scale. We’d love to get your feedback on the process once it completes, but rest assured we’re extremely committed to keeping you updated throughout the process.
TLDR:
- Pay money for products that haven’t been manufactured yet and are still in the product approvals process
- You’ll get consistent updates from us on the progress of those items so you know we’re working!
- Get said items in the not-too-distant-future, as a little treat
See y’all in Thedas once Dragon Age: The Veilguard releases!