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Christmas 2023 Last Posting Dates

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Yes, it’s that time of year again, where we publish our Christmas 2023 last posting dates !

 

Christmas 2023 Last Posting Dates – UK

Service Last Posting Date
Royal Mail 48 / Tracked 48 Monday 18th December
Royal Mail 24 / Tracked 24 Wednesday 20th December
Royal Mail Special Delivery Thursday 21st December
Yodel 48 Monday 18th December
Yodel Economy Delivery Friday 15th December

These dates apply to orders received by noon. We will keep packing and shipping right up until the point where we have to seal the post bags as the postman comes through the door to collect, but at busy times of the year like this, order synchronisation from our site to our shipping software can sometimes be a little slow.

Please note that Royal Mail 24 or Royal Mail 48 are services which do not guarantee a delivery date; only Special Delivery does that.

Although Royal Mail have so far been handling the Christmas pressure better this year than previous ones, we definitely advise placing orders early rather than leaving it until the last minute !

We will be posting orders between Christmas and New Year on all the days that Royal Mail and our couriers offer collections.

 

Christmas 2023 Last Posting Dates – International

International orders should be placed by Monday 11th December to have a chance of being delivered by Christmas. However, customs and weather-related delays can be very unpredictable at this time of year, so we recommend placing orders early !

Shipping Updates September 2023

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Getting delivery right is one of our top priorities – probably to the point of being a bit OCD about it !  We’ve recently made a couple of changes to our shipping options.

Dropping DPD

The main change is that we’ve stopped using DPD. This is due to a combination of a price increase we felt was too high to pass on to our customers, and a gradual deterioration in the standard of their service.

Before setting up SnM Stuff, I spent a long time in the logistics industry, doing everything from being a motorcycle courier to running the accounts department of a quality regional courier company. In the process, I learned that there is a cycle that service companies tend to follow. They realise they need to do better, so they work hard to really improve the service. Then everyone discovers how good they are and starts using them. At that point they can’t cope with the extra volume, and the company increases prices to try to maintain profits while the service levels drop. Then the whole cycle starts again.

I feel that DPD are currently on the downslope of that cycle; they were brilliant, but it’s just starting to slip. After a delivery where the driver just landed it on the local parcel shop and falsified the delivery status (I guess going up a flight of stairs was too much for him…), they just took the view that it was our problem (when we eventually managed to get them to respond to contact) and we were left by them to solve it for ourselves. We solved it, but it involved a 70-mile round trip to retrieve the parcel and deliver it ourselves – luckily our customer was really understanding. That was the point where we decided it was time to stop using them.

Introducing Yodel

In place of DPD, we are now offering delivery by Yodel. Yes, I know Yodel used to have a poor reputation, but they have invested heavily in their infrastructure and it’s paying off. We’ve been testing their service for a while, and found it to be very good – not perfect of course, because we live in the real world, but the on-time delivery success rate is somewhat better than DPD’s. Just as importantly, the only delivery issue we’ve had with them so far was minor, easily solved, and they were very helpful in resolving it.

Yodel’s prices are more reasonable than DPD’s, and have the advantage of better surcharges for out-of-area locations and no surcharges currently for congestion charge or ULEZ zones. Best of all, they count Saturday as a normal delivery day so that orders placed on a Friday will be delivered on the Saturday without being surcharged. This all helps us keep our free shipping threshold unchanged.

Royal Mail Price Increases

Royal Mail are having a general price increase on Monday 2nd October, the second this year. It works out at about 10% across most services, and 15-20% for Large Letters. Additionally, for business customers only they will also be introducing two new surcharges – a green surcharge from 6th November, and a seasonal surcharge which will be in place from 20th November until 7th January.

We’re still working through the impact this increase will have on the prices we charge. Our goal is to charge postage at what it costs without making any extra money from it, and only subsidise post for orders over the free shipping threshold. It simplifies the maths when we work out our product prices, and helps us keep prices lower if we don’t have to factor in the cost of subsidising postage.

So far, we haven’t found a viable alternative to Royal Mail for Large Letter sized deliveries. After the price increase, Yodel will be comparable to the Royal Mail Tracked48 service, but we’re hesitant when it comes to giving Evri another try ! We’d welcome feedback on this !

 

Two Website Tweaks

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This is just a brief update to let you know that over the last couple of days we’ve made a couple of nice website tweaks.

PayPal Plugin Update

The first is an update to our PayPal payment plugin. This has a number of benefits, both for us and for you;

  • The previous plugin was getting long in the tooth and is being retired soon. The new one will make it easier for them to keep up to date and secure in the future.
  • It communicates between our website and PayPal’s in a different way which should avoid (or at least reduce) the issue of the connections timing out.
  • It makes it clearer that you can choose to pay through your PayPal account or by debit or credit card through PayPal.
  • Finally, it may offer you a “Pay Later” option. This is entirely between you and PayPal and they’ll determine if you’re eligible. What I would say about it is that although it’s a great option (especially for larger orders), you should only do it if you’re absolutely sure the repayments are affordable. While I love getting orders, I’d never want to be the cause of someone getting into financial difficulties !

New Tracking Number Plugin

The second of the website tweaks is that we’ve implemented a new plugin to fix the issue we’ve had where tracking numbers were not showing on the despatch notification emails. They will now appear ! They’ll show the tracking number and a link you can use to go to the tracking page. The tracking link currently only works if your order is sent by Royal Mail.  If you have an account with us, the tracking information will be in your order history there, as well.

For non Royal Mail carriers, the tracking link doesn’t currently do anything. It will still show you which carrier was used and the tracking number, and we’re looking at how to make it work with other carriers.

Both of these changes are likely to need some cosmetic fine-tuning over the next few days. Overall, I hope you’ll find they make things easier for you.  Any feedback you have is welcome !

 

Epic Battles Waterloo – First Wave Now In Stock !

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The first batch of Epic Battles Waterloo sets from Warlord Games has just arrived ! There has been a lot of interest in this, and apparently it is the biggest product launch Warlord Games have done for many, many years. As an avid Napoleonic wargamer, re-enactor and historian this is something I’ve been very curious to see.

My first impression when I opened our delivery is really good. The starter sets are absolutely massive, weighing in at well over 2 kilos each. That’s over 1000 figures in each one, as well as rulebooks, flag sheets, scenery etc. The boxes of additional figures are also very good value. Cavalry boxes include 55 cavalry, bases, a battery of three horse artillery pieces, a sheet of flags and some optional parts. Infantry boxes have 300 figures plus mounted commanders and a battery of three foot artillery. Infantry figures are moulded in ranks, which will make them easier to paint.

Epic Battles Waterloo British Sprues

Warlord have inevitably had to make some choices with these sets, because tooling for plastic figures can be a hugely expensive process. Overall, I would say they have made the right choices. They have focused on the Waterloo campaign because it is so iconic, but it does mean all the uniforms are very much late-period Napoleonic. At this scale, a lot of that can be solved just by using a different paint scheme, so it’s not too much of an issue. French infantry in the 1812 Bardin uniform are useful for the 1813 campaign onward (or  possibly I Corps in the Russian Campaign), although these figures could also be painted as some Confederation of the Rhine units which inherited and adapted Austrian coats. The good news is that about a third of the French infantry are in greatcoats, which means you can use them as far back as 1806.

The figures are moulded in a terracotta red for British and Blue for French, which I must admit I have mixed feelings about. It does mean you’ll need to ensure your primer is opaque before painting. It probably makes them more suited to a black primer and then working lighter, rather than a white primer based method. But with so many figures in the starter boxes, it makes sense because you can base them and get a game going quickly rather than having to worry about painting every single figure before you start.

In terms of scale, Epic Battles uses 12mm sized figures. Part of this is probably a commercial consideration, as it enables them to have their own “ecosystem” rather than releasing a set of rules that can be used with other manufacturer’s figures. The only figures which are compatible with them will be if you are lucky enough to have any of the old short-lived Hinchcliffe “System 12” range from the 1970’s. But the good news is that 12mm is an almost exact match for model railway N Gauge, which gives you a whole new source of scenery and buildings.

Another good choice Warlord have made is to make all the figures in plastic. Promotional and short-run figures could come out in metal, but it looks like they are avoiding resin; definitely a good decision on their part !

Based on what they are telling us, Warlord are highly committed to both this scale, and the Napoleonic period in particular.  The second wave has already been announced, and when I asked them at a recent retailer webinar about extending the range to cover other Napoleonic armies the response was that they do plan to, although it’ll be over a period of time. Overall I’m very impressed with this range, and look forward to seeing it develop.

You can find all these products on our website at https://www.snmstuff.co.uk/product-category/warlord-games/epic-battles/napoleonic/   – note that we’ve split Epic Battles into sub-categories for Napoleonic and American Civil War, because if this scale gets supported as well as Warlord are suggesting, many more boxes and additional periods are likely to be produced in due course.

Gorilla Glue

Glues and Putties Dedicated Category Launched

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When you look down the category list on our website, you’ll see we’ve added one for Glues and Putties.  It’s something we’ve been meaning to give some love to for a while !  Over time, we’ve added more and more of these types of product within the various brands we stock. But it meant they were scattered across our website, and we decided it might help to bring them all together. That way, in this era of stock shortages (hopefully easing as time goes on) if the one you really want is unavailable, you’ll be able to easily find an equivalent.

You’ll see that we have created sub-categories by brand (plus one for “others”). It seemed the most logical way to do it, but feedback on this is welcome !

We have also added a completely new range; Gorilla Glue.  We wanted to find a good replacement for Zap glues, which are no longer imported into the UK. Glue is like Marmite, everyone has a strong preference and definite favourites, but I asked a selection of friends which cyanoacrylate glue they preferred to use for modelling, and more came back with “Gorilla” than any other answer. So now we’ve got a good selection of their products in stock for you.  We’ve aimed to make our prices as reasonable as we can; the formula we worked toward was if you had a shopping cart with a couple of products in and added a Gorilla Glue, would the price plus it’s share of the postage be less than going into town and buying it from B&Q ?  I think we’ve managed it for most of their products.

If there are any other glues you would like to see us stock, let me know and I will see if we can get hold of them for you !

 

 

Reaper Miniatures Paints

Reaper Miniatures Paints

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We’ve added yet another new product category for you on our website ! This time, it’s Reaper Miniatures paints.

You can find them on our website at https://www.snmstuff.co.uk/…/reaper-miniatur…/reaper-paints/

We’re starting gently on this one, dipping our toes in by adding their Triads and a few sets of paints. If they’re popular, we’ll ramp it up fast, and if there’s a particular set you’d like, drop me a note and I’ll see if we can get it !

I used a bottle of Reaper’s Master Series red the other day, it’s the first time I’d used their paints, and I was really impressed with the smoothness and coverage. Red and yellow are always the colours I test a new range with, as they can often be the most fickle.  That’s something to do with the pigments for those colours, which often don’t stay properly suspended in the medium, separating out fast after mixing.  Reaper Miniatures paints give really great coverage straight out of the bottle, but the recommended technique is usually to thin them to make layering and blending easier. I haven’t tried mixing them with Vallejo acrylics yet, but both types are water based acrylics so it would probably work quite well.

Flex-I-File Combo Set

New Products – Flex-i-file and some Metal Perry Miniatures

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We’ve added a few new products recently, including the Flex-i-file range and some metal Perry Miniatures.

Flex-i-file are a Canadian company, specialising in high quality abrasive products of all kinds.  They are best known for the Flex-i-file itself, an innovative frame holding an abrasive tape in a way which enables it to curve to match rounded surfaces. It is a great way to avoid creating the flat spots you can get with conventional files and sanders. There is a wide selection of different grit tapes available, colour coded so you can easily select the one which fits the job at hand.

But as well as the flex-i-file, they also make a comprehensive range of other abrasive products. There are skinny sanders, sanding needles (on of my favourites for cleaning mould lines off figures !), micro finishing cloths and a host of other things to solve your sanding and finishing needs.

You can find all their products on the new Flexifile page on our website !

Another thing we’ve added is a small selection of metal Perry Miniatures figures. They are mostly command packs of named characters, although many of them (particularly the medieval ones) can be used as generic officers or generals for the army they are designed for. We buy them in from an authorised wholealer rather than Perry themselves, so sadly this is all the selction we can get at present (although if there is interest, we can try pushing to get access to more !)  The selction we’ve got includes a couple of artillery pieces – one each Wars of the Roses and Prussian Napoleonic, as well as command figures for the Agincourt and Wars of the Roses medieval periods, and Napoleonic commands. With the sculpts being made by the Perry twins, these are some of the highest quality 28mm figures you can buy !

Perry Miniatures French Mounted Command at Agincourt

 

Renedra Railings with a Gate

Two More Categories Rejuvenated and One Added

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As part of our process of working through updating the site, there are two more categories rejuvenated. They are paint brushes, and Gunze Sangyo. In addition, we’ve added a sub-category to Accessories for Renedra products.

Paint Brushes

With paint brushes, the sub-categories used to be by whether it was a set, or an individual brush. But that started looking messy, so we’ve changed to having the sub-categories by brand. That seems to work better for our customers, who are generally smart enough to know what they want ! We’ve added some new brushes, as well; in BrokenToad Brushes, we’ve added their Spearhead and Flat brushes, and we’ve added the full range of Lifecolor Brushes. As time goes on we will add sets of brushes within each brand, which should make it easier if you want to buy multiple brushes (as well as enabling us to build in a discount for buying one of each !)

Gunze Sangyo

We’ve fully re-stocked Gunze Sangyo, including their fabulous Mr Metal Color buffable paints. We have also added quite a lot of additional products to all of the sub-categories. This includes more of their Mr Hobby auxiliary products, as well as starting to add their paint sets. One we’re already finding particularly popular is Mr Cement Limonene – designed to glue plastic, but with a citrus smell rather than the chemical smell usually associated with plastic cement. Ideal if “she who must be obeyed” complains about the smell !

Part of our philosophy behind the expansion is to build the sales volumes so that we can put in an order every week with each of our suppliers. Getting into a fixed cycle should make it easier to work with our suppliers, easier to predict our cashflow, and help both us and our customers by significantly improving product availability.

Here’s a question for you; we’ve now got the whole current selection of Gunze Sangyo panel line markers – do you think we should put them in their own sub-category ?

Renedra

As well as the categories we’ve rejuvenated, we’ve also added Renedra Accessories. This is one where we thought long and hard about where it fitted ! We were unsure if it should go in a wargaming category, or under modelling materials. So eventually, we decided to give it a category of it’s own.

We’ve wanted to carry Renedra products for a while, because they are such a great fit to other things we already do. The Renedra range has a great selection of 28mm scale scenery, bases, and other accessories. Whether it’s roleplaying games, tabletop skirmish games like Blood Eagle and Frostgrave, or large-scale tabletop wargaming, there’s something useful in the range for you !  Initially we’ve added some of their scenery. The plan is to rapidly add their bases and other goodies until we’ve got the complete selection.

 

We hope you like what we’re doing with the site, and welcome feedback on which categories to focus in on next !  The three that are on the radar are Chessex Dice, other Dice, and Mig Ammo. The first two of those are just about updating them, and ensuring that everything we’ve got in stock is on the website. Mig Ammo is likely to be longer term, as it’s more about getting the cashflow together to sustain the large minimum economic order size. But with your help, we’ll get there !

Reaper by Theme

Reaper Miniatures Organised by Theme

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Based on feedback (thank you !) from our last email newsletter, I’ve gone through and organised all our Reaper Miniatures by theme.

It’s taken a few days, and I’ll be the first to admit that some of the categorisation is very much on a “best fit” basis. To give you a few ideas about the thought process that went into it, here are some examples of the things I’ve done;

  • The Dragons theme includes both dragons and things that can be thought of as dragon-kin. You’ll find wyverns, hydras (hydrae ?), and the like here.
  • With Characters by Species I didn’t include one for humans, as it would be so big as to be almost useless.
  • Characters by Class is split into male and female for the most popular classes, but not for the less-populated ones.
  • In some cases I have gone by what a figure looks like, rather than the pure title. For example, things that look swashbuckling are in the Pirates theme even if they don’t actually have the work “pirate” in the title.
  • For a non-human characters, in most cases it’s probably faster to look by species or monster type. A dwarven rogue might also be found under female rogues, but it is likely to be quicker to look in dwarves.
  • Please give me some feedback on Undead !  I’m wondering if it is too broad a category, or if I should split it into three or four. I’m thinking skeletons, vampires, spectral and squishy. I need a better title for the last one; it covers, zombies, ghouls, and other undead that still have most of their gooey bits.
  • Dungeon Monsters is a catch-all category. It covers critters of the “this doesn’t fit anywhere !” variety.
  • Beasts includes familiars and furry things.
  • Vermin includes things that come in swarms or have too many (or few) legs than is nice.

As always with Reaper, a different or unusual paint scheme can totally change the look of a figure. Think laterally when you are searching ! You might find a barbarian or rogue figure who is perfect for that lightly-armoured warrior. Something you find in Elves could be just begging to be painted as a drow.

If you think I’ve put any figures in the wrong theme, please do let me know; I expect this to be a “work in progress” for a while !

e-books

Blood Eagle and Daisho – Our First E-books

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We recently added a Wargames Rules category to our website, and now we’ve extended it by including our first two E-books !  They are PDF editions of Blood Eagle and Daisho, skirmish rules published by the Ministry of Gentlemanly Warfare. Craig and Charles, the authors are friends of ours, and we are pleased and honoured to have agreed with them that we’ll have exclusive rights to sell the e-book versions of these rules.

The authors of Blood Eagle and Daisho also bought us In Her Majesty’s Name (often abbreviated to IHMN), Steampunk skirmish wargames rules. They were published by Osprey, and are one of their top selling rule sets. All three sets of rules share a very similar underlying set of principles, meaning that if you’re familiar with one of them, it’s easy to pick up the others. The authors’ genius is in enabling each set to give a great “feel” of the setting while keeping the game fluid and playable.

Coming very soon from them will be IHMN Gothic, which takes the same rules engine and adapts it to Victorian Horror settings. We had a demo day in our shop a couple of weeks ago, and had some brilliant games with vampires versus werewolves !

Getting the technology behind the e-books up and running has been an interesting challenge. We’ve tested them extensively on a wide variety of devices, and made a number of adjustments to the settings to make them both secure and user-friendly. When you buy them, our system will send you an automated email with a download link. Don’t worry if it takes a minute or two to get your e-book once you’ve clicked the link. It’s a file of approximately 5MB, and each one is individually generated for you.

One other great thing about games from The Ministry of Gentlemanly Warfare is that they’ve got a really good community among the players, with the authors actively engaged. Each game has it’s own blog and Facebook page, and there is a “hub” blog to bring it all together at https://theministryofgentlemanlywarfare.wordpress.com/

 


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