Statement from Diamond Comics

 statement from Diamond Comics, who supplies most of our comics from Marvel, Boom, IDW, etc. regarding the delays in shipments over the past months:

DCD Customer Status Update for January 7 from Chris Powell, Chief Sales & Service Officer

I hope you've entered the new year safe and healthy, ready to tackle 2025. Over the holidays, our focus was on making as much improvement on the issue of timeliness as possible. Since there was no truly new information to share in that period, I was pleased to receive a status update from our Operations team yesterday and to learn of some forward momentum going into this new week.

This week, nearly all US retailers were scheduled to receive their product by Wednesday. That's particularly good news considering we lost a day each week due to the holidays. There are some pockets of disruption due to a winter storm, but the shipments leaving our warehouse were on a better pace than they had been in December.

This still does not meet our internal goals or retailers' expectations, but we continue to work with the Operations teams to identify changes that may allow us to ship products more consistently.

Our Distribution Process

Following the recent changes, many of you have had questions about why things haven't shipped from the distribution center as quickly as we or you need them to.

Periodicals that we don't receive directly from the various printers (periodicals from publishers who sell to us through other wholesalers) arrive to us over the weekend or as late as Monday for the following week's releases. We deal with a much wider selection of products, both print and non-print, than other distributors and that leads to delayed or misrouted deliveries that must be dealt with before the picking and packing of orders can begin.

Retailers who are furthest way from the center are picked first, then the next furthest, then the next, etc. As they are picked, they are packed and then handed off to trucking companies for delivery. Then the process begins again ...

This process is not working as it needs to, obviously, but modifying it takes time. Ideally, changes would have been planned and tested while we continued to operate as we had been at Plattsburgh. With that no longer an option, we must make changes and test them with live data and shipments while trying to minimize the impact on retailers.

We are considering many options, and they will almost certainly involve additional changes from the way we have operated in the past. I assure you, this is still the primary focus for our Operations, Purchasing, and Retailer Services teams and we will keep you in the loop as there are further developments.

Thank You

We appreciate how difficult these changes have been for our retailer partners, and wish very much that we did not have to go through this with you at the busiest time of year. Your patience and positive attitudes throughout this process are very much appreciated and I will continue to reach out as there are changes or progress to share with you.