About the Otherworlds Inc

Q: What happened to the Glacias Volume 1 Kickstarter?

We began the Glacias Volume 1 Kickstarter two months prior to the world becoming aware of Covid-19. To add, the economic and pandemic implications associated with it was something we never knew would happen in real life. Otherworlds Inc is still a very new Start-Up company built by young creatives with a dream to build worlds. Our hope with the kickstarter was for it to help us bring revenue to the authors, and the publishing team behind the comic Glacias. We had hoped that the Kickstarter would have helped us grow in order for us to begin working on even greater projects for the Glacias World, but this was a severe failure.

The original pricing and costs we had estimated the kickstarter to be was based on a pre-pandemic estimation from manufacturing companies and Shipping companies like Shipmonk. However, when the pandemic struck, all pricing skyrocketed to an extreme amount, making the original estimations completely wrong.

All goods for this kickstarter became nearly impossible to push through with the budget we had gained from the kickstarter. In fact, it had put all of us into debt. However, we still attempted to see it through and use not just all the funds we had gained, but also our own money in order to help make this kickstarter dream a success. We took a lot of work during the pandemic, especially H.S. Crow. He took up three jobs during the pandemic, and nearly died in a accident due to a reckless driver rear ending him. Till this day, he is still recovering.

We wanted to make everyone that supported us happy, but in turn it put us in a hole... Not only did we nearly become bankrupt, but in our eyes, we felt like we had failed our amazing fanbase. We never wanted anyone to be upset, but no matter how much we tried to make this kickstarter a success, the issues caused by the pandemic grew worse.

What were the issues?

1. Pricing increased severely for manufacturing and the goods associated with it.
2. The shipping agreements we had were broken by the shipper who did not want to stay true to the original pricing we had agreed on. This forced us to seek other shippers, and we ended up with a contract that was far more expensive.
3. Since we had already charged everyone prior to the pandemic, we were unable to update the prices and thus we were stuck trying to make this project succeed by working jobs.
4. The manufacturers we worked with... many went bankrupt, and could not send the items we had paid for. Majority did not refund us. Others sent us broken products and rejected our request for them to fix it. It was not worth it in their eyes, and since we had no money to be able to legally seek help... no matter how much we tried, we lost. Hence, the figurines and mugs being a loss.
5. The manufacturers that continued to work with us, were unable to send us the products until nearly 2-3 years after the original contracts... this led to us being unable to fulfill orders until 2022.
6. The shipper we ended up using also broke agreements and messed up severely with the weights and international orders. This caused the original pricing we had agreed on early in 2022 to no longer be honored and they lied about trying to fix it.
7. Due to the errors by the final shipper, it forced us to be even more delayed and it created dissatisfaction among our community with packages not being delivered properly or severely late.
8. We have started a legal dispute with the shipper due to the negligence and mistakes they made which caused our reputation to be hurt.

After countless attempts to complete this kickstarter, we have concluded this to be a failure, and due to this we have changed how we function. As of now, we are no longer interested in doing any Kickstarter, and we are changing our business model to a more traditional one. This has been a frustrating and painfully long experience, but it has taught us a lot and we plan to use this experience to grow and make sure we do better.

If you were affected by this we express our sincere apology. If we had known a pandemic would occur, we would have tackled the Glacias publication a completely different way.

What do we plan to do going forward?

We plan to publish Glacias to completion, but with a large publisher we are partnering with. We want to deliver products and better shipping, and we plan to do this by partnering with POD manufacturers. Our goal is to step away from fulfillment and lean more towards the creative aspects of our company which is the building of worlds and new creative works.

We hope that you can understand what caused the loss of the kickstarter, and how hard we tried to continue it, even with the world against us. Instead of the kickstarter helping our company, it nearly destroyed us.

Our hope is to come back from this loss by moving forward with new creations and a better business model. If you wish to see us grow, and see the development of new worlds, please consider supporting us by checking out our merch or products, or subscribing to our Instagram, especially since we plan to deliver our first motion comic series.