We are reaching out to apologize for our lack of communication over the last year and present another update. Since the Covid pandemic hit in 2020, our team has been hyper-focused on the survival of the studio and ensuring that all affected statue projects continue to delivery. The pandemic brought a cascade of unforeseeable complications and challenges on a scale that has made recovery slow and difficult to achieve.
Our original statue projects are very limited in production, which was made possible by strong supply chains and manufacturing infrastructure in China prior to the onset of the pandemic. However, in the ensuing years, the environment around manufacturing high-end statues for us changed dramatically. Our main factory partners suffered exceptionally, leading to a dramatic reduction in the skilled workforce capable of meeting our signature quality standards.
This sudden and prolonged loss of skill across the statue industry forced several major operational changes that resulted in our projects relegated to production purgatory. Our factory partners cannot and will not take on small edition projects like ours, and the (extremely long) queues for production are now strictly prioritized around large edition projects of 5000pcs+.
The manufacturing environment we are currently navigating has resulted in many of our small scale projects being pushed into 2023, and now, some into cancellation.
This also affects projects we had made in collaboration with our partners like Skybound Games. Specifically we had originally intended for their Lee and Clem Statue to ship this Fall but we now are projecting that to be Q2 2023 based on the current state of the factory.
We are still determining which projects absolutely cannot proceed, but if a project you have backed is selected for cancellation, we will provide you a full refund for your order.
There has been some positive movement in recent months, however, with our projects Mandy's Chainsaw Battle Diorama and Ghost of Tsushima's Jin Sakai finally completing production this month. Thankfully, these statues will likely ship to customers before the end of the year. We are tentatively hopeful that this is the beginning of a positive trend for our remaining projects in production and that cancellations will be minimal.
We apologize again for our lack of communication, but we hope that this update assures our customers and fans that despite our quietness we continue to work very hard behind-the-scenes to bring these statues we designed and crafted to fruition and delivered into collector's hands.
While none of this situation is ideal for anyone involved, we look forward to bringing you more updates as these projects begin to roll off the factory floor and to the port.
Our team thanks you sincerely for your continued patience as we keep up our work. We will have more information about the upcoming shipments within a few weeks for customers of these projects.
Sending you our best,
- The Level52 Team