BoxThrone: Lovely product, shame about the business model

Pictured on the left is something I consider a thing of beauty.  Yes, that's a shelving system dedicated to board game storage, replacing the "pile in a closet, plus a few here and there" storage model I've been using for years.  A place for (nearly) everything, and everything in its place, easily accessed, and with room for further additions... truly, I wish I could say "go buy yours now" without reservation.  Unfortunately, there's a huge reservation I have to pass along as well.

You see, this concept originally started out as a Kickstarter project, before being rolled out as a stand-alone business.  Unfortunately, they decided to stick to a custom-order model, doubtless to not have to deal with managing/storing stock... but that means that, if anything goes astray, it impacts the customers directly.  With overseas manufacturing involved, well... things can get out of hand.

And so, to the story of my order experience.  I ordered a shelving package in late April, as part of "Wave 3" of their pre-order system, assuming that, between the Kickstarter and prior "waves", they should have most of the bugs ironed out.  At that time, the latest delivery date listed was in mid-July, which I thought to be a bit long to wait, but, for a custom solution that perfectly addressed a problem I was having, it was tolerable.  I was pleasantly surprised, then, when I got a shipment notice in early June.  Unfortunately, due to limitations with their order tracking system, I could only see the one tracking number for the three boxes that were sent along, and furthermore no indication that it was a partial shipment.  So, I merrily assembled what had come so far, only to discover that the actual shelves were the part that was missing.  After emailing in and verifying that it was, in fact, a known-partial shipment, I felt mildly let down... but, with the remainder slated to show up the following month, I decided to leave what assembly work I had done untouched, and just work around the nuisance of the frames taking up space for that long.

Then, things started going sideways.  The mid-July delivery date became an end-of-July delivery date, then the end of August, then the end of September, each delay coming as the last deadline was fast approaching... unfortunately, I didn't think to do this when I first ordered, but I had the Internet Archive Wayback Machine copy their shipping FAQ after the second delay, so you can see that here.  Then, in early-mid September, they delayed once again to the end of October (which is what their site says today, thank you Wayback Machine)... and, frankly, I'd had more than enough of this saga by then.  I won't go into the whole back and forth involved, but it turns out that the main sticking point on my order was that I had ordered some longer shelves for the space between the frames (if you look closely, I've got a few obnoxiously-long games that would have been lovely to put on their own shelves in the middle).  They had some stock of their regular shelves on-hand, in off-colors from the frames I'd already received, that they were willing to send along instead of the original shelves ordered, an offer I readily accepted.

So, yeah, now that I've got my shelves, I'm a happy camper, but I sure paid a premium for them in stress.  If they look like something you would like... honestly, I'd say wait until next year, and see whether they manage to make good on their current "waves" in a timely manner (Wave 5 currently has a 15DEC19 last delivery date)... or better still, wait until they're able to run under a "order what we have in stock" model rather than a "pre-order and we'll try to get things to you on time" model.  But, at the end of the day, it's your money and sanity to risk, so, if you want to jump in now, here's the link to the BoxThrone website.