An honest update on our shipping crisis
If you searched "Yarro Studios scam" and landed here from Reddit or a 1-star review, you've heard one side. Here's mine, with the receipts.
We hired a fulfillment company to ship Gamefold, Diceomatic, and our accessory orders. They underperformed, overbilled, and eventually used our inventory as leverage in a billing dispute. We settled in April 2026, got our product back, and are now shipping with new partners. Every region is picked up. EU and Canada are both about 95% complete. In the US, 1,500 orders have shipped since the switch and 1,200 more are in staging with tracking. If you're still waiting, thank you for your patience. Your stuff is on the way.
Hiring this fulfillment company was our call. So was staying too long.
How we got here
In 2024 we hired a third-party fulfillment company to warehouse and ship Gamefold, Diceomatic, and our Kickstarter accessory orders. They were introduced through a consultant who worked closely with their team. They pitched themselves as a serious operator and told us, in writing, they had worked with several major national brands. We took that as proof they could handle our volume. We built a shipping budget of roughly $1.2M off the numbers they helped supply. They promised us a 3PL portal to track our own inventory in real time. We never got access to it.
They told us in writing that their LA warehouse could ship 2,000 orders a week and their NJ warehouse could ship 500. That's 2,500 a week between two locations. We took them at their word.
What actually happened
Six months in, we had paid them roughly $1.5 million and fulfillment wasn't close to done. We ran our own projection on what it would cost to finish — about another $300,000. That would put us $600K over the original budget, but we were learning the real cost of this in real time, so we accepted it and pushed them to finish.
When we told them our number and asked them to wrap it up, they came back with a different one. They said the finishing cost would be $500,000. A few weeks later, after we told them we were going to come pick up our own product and finish fulfillment ourselves, the number went to $700,000. Then to $1 million. The faster we pushed for the end, the bigger the bill got.
That's when they started using our inventory as leverage.
In the same period, the actual shipping work was a fraction of what they had promised. Between mid-November 2025 and mid-January 2026, they moved roughly 800 orders. Eight weeks. That's about 100 orders per week — against 2,500 per week they had promised in writing.
We sent someone from our team to their LA warehouse in December to find out why things were so slow. They knew he was coming. The team wasn't working when he arrived. They were having a holiday party.
The invoices we couldn't reconcile
The bills weren't just high. They didn't add up.
- An invoice came through for $73,536 that was for a completely different company. They had attached another client's invoice to a Yarro reference number. We caught it. They didn't.
- A $29,365 invoice listed 10 orders. $29K for 10 orders is nonsense. When we refused to pay it, they came back days later and said it was actually 710 orders. They never provided tracking numbers, packing slips, or any documentation we could reconcile against.
- In late August 2025, they sent us a new "Negotiated Rate Arrangement" with handling fees of $1.80 for small items and $6.00 for large items — rates we had never seen before. The documents didn't specify whether the storage rate was daily, weekly, or monthly. The units weren't labeled. They tried to apply the new rates retroactively. We never approved them.
- They were billing for hundreds of premium European shipments — expedited next-day and two-day services — that we never authorized. They denied doing it. Their own shipment data showed at least 433 shipments sent that way.
When we asked why the balance kept ballooning, the answer was some version of "we don't have exact numbers from the vendors yet." That answer told us something we hadn't fully understood when we hired them. A meaningful portion of the warehousing and fulfillment work was being done by other companies they subcontracted to. Their Hong Kong location was, in their own written words, "a separate warehouse." When we asked about invoice line items, they often couldn't explain them because the underlying numbers were coming from vendors they themselves were waiting on.
We thought we'd hired a fulfillment company. The structure turned out to be more complicated than that.
The audit they didn't want
In early February 2026 we stopped paying and formally disputed all outstanding invoices. We asked them to sit down and reconcile everything — line by line, what was charged, what was paid, what was justified.
They agreed to reconcile. On one condition: we had to promise not to look at the $1.5 million in invoices we'd already paid. We have that in writing.
Not "they billed too much." Not "they were slow." A company we'd already paid $1.5M would only agree to reconcile our open balance if we agreed in writing not to look at the $1.5M we'd already given them. Whatever was in those invoices, they didn't want us going back through it.
The leverage and the threats
On January 27, 2026 — hours after we asked them to release two trucks of inventory we'd already paid for — they wrote this:
"We currently have a balance of $534,472.91 which is drastically over our initial credit limit for Yarro which was $100,000... the total amount outstanding will be no less then $735,000.00 but likely more. Our company policy when a client clears inventory is to collect all funds due and credit is revoked. You did express that was not possible so we are developing a plan to insure we maintain the leverage we need so we get paid in full but you are still able to get product and process orders."— Email from our former fulfillment company · January 27, 2026
They set the credit limit at $100K. They allowed our balance to grow past $500K without pausing service or warning us. They never substantiated the invoices that built the balance. And then they decided our customers' Gamefold tables and Diceomatic orders were the chip.
The leverage was your orders.
We also asked, repeatedly, for the contact information of the overseas warehouses holding our international inventory. We had product sitting in Hong Kong, Canada, the UK, and the EU and we wanted to talk to the warehouses directly so we could push fulfillment forward. They refused. In writing. We were not allowed to know where our own customers' goods were physically located.
On March 6, 2026, they put it in writing: they were going to "reach out to your customers to inquire on payment, and likely need to liquidate the inventory." That's our fulfillment company telling us they planned to contact our backers directly for payment they had already made to us. We replied the next day that doing so would be tortious interference with contract.
They escalated anyway. On March 27, 2026, their "final" settlement offer arrived in writing. The alternative remedies they listed if we didn't pay included liquidating our inventory and destroying our inventory. In the same email they reminded us they had consignee information for our customers and could "issue mass notices."
That was the moment we understood what we were dealing with. Our attorneys advised us to stop talking publicly while they had physical control of our inventory. So we went quiet. Backers asked us where their stuff was, and we couldn't answer in a way that made sense without putting more inventory at risk. That silence is the thing most of you remember. It wasn't because we didn't care. It was because there were trucks of product we still needed to get back.
Why we settled at all
We believe we could have fought this and gotten our goods without paying another dime. We had the documentation, we had no signed contract holding us to their numbers, and we had a strong case. But fighting it meant litigation. Litigation meant no movement on inventory for at least a year. That's a year of you waiting and a year of us not running a business.
We chose to settle for the amount we believed was actually outstanding. We didn't budge from that number. They eventually accepted it.
We didn't settle because we agreed with them. We settled because the fastest way to get product into your hands was to pay a number we could live with and walk away.
The settlement
We settled in April 2026 for $300,000. They had previously claimed we owed up to $1,087,000. We never agreed with that number and refused to pay it.
The settlement contains no NDA and no non-disparagement clause. That's how we're able to write this.
As part of the settlement, they were required to introduce us directly to the overseas warehouses they'd refused to identify for months. We now know where every unit of product is.
They were also supposed to cover the cost of moving our international inventory. They didn't. We paid for that ourselves and went and got all of it.
Where things stand now — updated August 3, 2026
Every region is picked up. All nine US truckloads came home in May, counted and sorted at our new fulfillment partner in Utah. Hong Kong is recovered. And the EU and Canada inventory is now out of the old warehouses and in the hands of our new fulfillment partners.
EU. About 95% complete. Shipping started July 7 through our partner in the Netherlands. Over 500 orders out. We asked EU backers whether they wanted delivery held over the summer holidays and a lot of them said yes, so those pallets are labeled with a name and a hold date, waiting for people to get home.
Canada. About 95% complete. Over 500 orders out through our partner in Vancouver. What's left is 60 brown tables, shipping from Clearship to Canada to close it out. Our previous fulfiller sent the wrong quantity north.
US. 1,500 orders shipped since we changed partners. 1,200 are in staging now and most already have tracking. Kickstarter backers shipped first, then web pre-orders, so the remaining group is mostly pre-orders.
What's left after that. A small number of orders need extra handling. Replacements, and accessories that got separated from the rest of an order somewhere in the move. We're compiling all of it now so it ships together instead of arriving in pieces.
On timing. We're not putting another finish date on this page. We've set two and missed two, and a missed date is worse than no date. We're publishing the number instead and updating it here as it moves. When it's zero, this page will say zero.
Nobody's getting told we ran out.
If you're owed a Gamefold, a Diceomatic, or accessories
You're in the system. EU and Canada are nearly done and US orders are going out every day. You don't need to email support to claim your order.
If your address changed, you lost your order number, or you're not sure we have you — that's when support helps. support@yarrostudios.com. Otherwise, watch your inbox.
What's changed at Yarro
We've left that company behind entirely. We've moved to regional 3PLs across the US, EU, UK, Canada, and Australia. Every contract is reviewed and signed by me. We can see inventory in every location in real time. No middlemen.
The new partners have been excellent, and they're doing it for a fraction of what we were paying before.
If something goes sideways again, you'll hear it from us first.