What I don't get about the Merch thing is that from what Michi said, they are extremely accommodating about how you want to do business, as long as you do it through them.
Michi did and will do future merch drops with larger pre-production amounts and shipping directly from a location in Indonesia for faster shipping to her home fanbase.
And from buying the Kuro birthday merch, one of the first drops that was done in-house, the shipping times were no issue, certainly much better than what I read here for other corpos.