Star Trek fans were excited by the announcement last September that longtime subscription box provider Loot Crate was partnering with venerable Star Trek licensee QMx to offer the Star Trek Mission Crate, a bimonthly subscription box of new apparel and collectibles from the Star Trek universe.

Customers were offered two choices: pay for a year’s worth of Mission Crate deliveries up front for $245, and receive a free bonus item — a metal replica of the movie-era Enterprise — or pay every two months, at $39.99 each.

Unfortunately, the experience for Star Trek Mission Crate customers has been extremely frustrating, and beset by a number of delays and limited informational updates.

These issues are not unique to Star Trek; a review of the Loot Crate customer support Twitter account indicates delays are frequent across their product line — but the recent experience for Star Trek Mission Crate subscribers have been particularly unfortunate.

The first box — titled “Wolf 359,” and themed after TNG’s “The Best of Both Wolds” — had been delayed twice, after originally scheduled to make a December 2017 debut. Initially, the crate was delayed from a month to January 2018, disappointing holiday shoppers who had purchased the crate as a Christmas gift.

In its place, Loot Crate sent a small bonus box to customers as a free gift, re-issuing several Star Trek items that had been in the company’s regular subscription box, a decent stop-gap measure for waiting fans.

But on January 30, subscribers were notified that the box was being delayed a second time, “to make a slight change to improve one of the items in our first Star Trek Mission Crate for a more show-accurate look.”

The “Wolf 359” crate finally shipped in late February, and to Loot Crate’s credit, the contents of the box did seem to have been well-received by subscribers — with particular praise for the Locutus of Borg figure produced by QMx, as well as the Shuttlecraft Galileo-themed outer packaging.

(If you missed it, check out our review of the first Mission Crate from March 2018!)

Since those early-2018 shipments went out, however, there have been no further shipments to Mission Crate subscribers. The second planned delivery, the Worf-themed “Way of the Warrior” crate, was originally expected to ship by the end of April, but it wasn’t until mid-May that subscribers heard about the status of this collection.

According to this May 15 update, the “Way of the Warrior” crate was now targeted to ship in mid-June. “We are excited to get it to you as soon as possible,” read the message. Despite the delay, subscribers were charged for the second Mission Crate release.

Weeks passed, and on June 15 — about when the second Mission Crate shipment was expected to start going out — the Loot Crate support team indicated that another delay was impacting the product, this time specifying that the problem centered around the box’s custom packaging. (This same reply was received by another inquiring subscriber as recently as June 28.)

Already behind schedule, Loot Crate then announced the theme of their planned June 2018 box: a Voyager-centric collection called “Dark Frontier,” themed around Seven of Nine and the Borg… but that announcement came with advanced notice of a delay on this third delivery, too, despite being charged for that month’s subscription fee.

After nine months of waiting for this Mission Crate product, these mounting delays have been extremely frustrating for subscribers, and have already caused some die-hard Trek fans to give up and cancel their subscriptions.

For the fans who purchased a full-year subscription when it was announced in September, the subscription system is less than three months from issuing auto-billing invoices for another $245, when only one of the six already-paid-for shipments have left Loot Crate’s warehouse.

While the vendor appears to have a number of issues causing delayed shipments of its products, nothing seems to be impacting their financial systems, which continues to charge customers on a regular schedule — as bi-monthly subscribers are already seeing charges for the yet-unannounced fourth delivery appearing on their credit card statements.

It seems that Loot Crate isn’t even ready to announce a theme for that next collection, indicating in a support tweet that they are still working on “behind the scenes logistics” — not a good sign if products are to be ordered and received for customer fulfillment anytime soon.

After hearing from many of you about the state of the Mission Crate fulfillment schedule, we reached out to Loot Crate to see what the company could tell us about the situation.

While they were not able to share with us a specific schedule as to when shipments would resume, Loot Crate provided TrekCore the following statement regarding the Mission Crate program.

“Loot Crate is working diligently with [product supplier] QMx to provide a high-quality, narrative-driven experience for ‘Star Trek Mission Crate’ subscribers. Unfortunately, we have experienced delays in developing the crates and getting them out to the fans.

We are deeply sorry for this inconvenience. We have resolved the issues and are working diligently to get subscribers’ ‘Star Trek’ experience back on track.”
 

Given the significant delays that have impacted all of the subscription boxes so far, it seems the company has a lot of work to do in the weeks and months ahead in order to catch up to what their customers have already paid for.

From their commentary today, Loot Crate claims that things are moving back in the right direction — but only time will tell if the exasperated subscribers will get the Star Trek goodies they’ve been waiting for, as their apology does not differ too much from the repeated feedback offered by their public customer service team.

We’ll continue to follow this program as the summer progresses and will bring you updates on shipments when they begin to resume.

Did you sign up for the Star Trek Mission Crate program? Tell us about your experience in the comments below.