Written by , Assistant Director, Loaded Dice Last reviewed

Why you can trust us with a deposit

You are being asked to send money to a shop you have not heard of, often for an object that has not been made yet, and to wait a year or more for it. That is a lot to ask. This page sets out who we actually are, what happens to your money, and what protects you if we get it wrong — including the parts that are not flattering.

Who you are actually paying

Halidom is a trading name of Loaded Dice Ltd. There is no separate Halidom company, no holding structure and no third party in between: the card payment goes to the same company that has been filing accounts since 2020 and that runs the shop in Barry.

  • Loaded Dice Ltd, company number 12429789, registered in Wales and incorporated on 28 January 2020. The Companies House record is public: directors, accounts, filing history, all of it.
  • VAT registered, GB 342132248. Halidom acts as the UK importer: import VAT and any applicable customs duty are handled by us and included in the displayed price, so nothing further is due on delivery.
  • Registered office and trading address: Unit C4, Windmill Parc, Hayes Road, Sully, Vale of Glamorgan, CF64 5AD. Not a mail-forwarding address.
  • A shop with a door. Loaded Dice has traded from a physical shop since 2023. The telephone below is answered there, by someone who can walk to the stock.

Halidom itself is new, and we would rather say so than imply otherwise. What is not new is the company standing behind the reservation, and that is the part that matters when the piece is eighteen months out.

What actually happens to your money

Here is the part most pre-order shops leave vague. Your deposit is paid to Loaded Dice Ltd and moved into a separate bank account in the company's name that is used for nothing else. It is not spent on placing your order with the distributor, on stock, on wages or on anything else in the ordinary running of the business; the company funds those from its own working capital. Money leaves that account on two occasions only. When your piece has arrived, passed inspection and shipped, the deposit becomes part of the price you have paid. And if you cancel, the 10% is retained to cover the 10% we still owe the manufacturer for the order we placed for you the day you reserved — the same figure, passed through, which is why the retained amount is 10% and not a number we chose.

Two honest limits on that. It is a ring-fence, not a trust or an escrow: the account belongs to Loaded Dice Ltd, so if the company failed the money in it would be company money rather than yours, and an administrator would treat it as such. And it rests on our own discipline rather than a third party's — there is no outside custodian checking it. Any retailer telling you a deposit is "held safely" for a year should be asked exactly where, by whom, and what happens to it if they go under. This is our answer, including the part we cannot promise.

Alongside that, we keep your exposure small and short:

  • Ten per cent, not the whole price. A reservation takes 10%. On a £2,000 piece that is £200 at risk rather than £2,000, for the entire wait.
  • The balance is requested at the end, not the beginning. Not on an estimated date, not when the studio says it has shipped — when the piece is physically with us in the Vale of Glamorgan and has passed inspection. If it never arrives, you were never asked for the rest.
  • Your card is not charged in the meantime. Nothing is taken between the deposit and the balance request, and nothing is charged without telling you first.

The protection that would survive the company is not our ring-fence, it is your card. Pay the deposit with a credit card and Section 75 of the Consumer Credit Act can make the card issuer jointly liable with us for the whole purchase, deposit and balance alike, where the cash price is from £100.01 to £30,000 and the other statutory conditions are met. Debit cards have chargeback instead. We explain both, including where they do not apply, on how your deposit is protected — which is an odd page for a shop to write, since it tells you how to claim against us.

What we promise about dates, and what we do not

We do not promise dates. Studios miss them, licensors hold approvals, factories run late and freight is freight. Any statue retailer implying otherwise is new, or not being straight with you.

What we promise is that you find out before you have to ask. Every estimate on the site carries the date we last checked it against our distributor's schedule. When one moves, we update the product page, email everyone holding a reservation, and keep the old date struck through beside the new one rather than quietly overwriting it. Every change we have ever published is listed on the release tracker under "dates that have moved", with the date it changed — so you can see how often it happens here before you commit, and check afterwards that we did what this paragraph says.

A moved date does not change your reservation: the price you agreed is the price you pay, whatever happens to the exchange rate, the trade price or duty in the meantime.

Before it reaches you

Every piece is inspected by us before the balance is requested. Inspection means we open the outer carton and the studio shipper, lift the piece and its parts out of the foam and test any lighting, check the paint and the parts against the studio's photography, and repack it in the same foam and shipper before it ships. We do not break factory seals on inner bags unless a part has to be checked.

It ships in the studio's own shipper, double-boxed where the packaging warrants it, insured, tracked and signed for, with a courier chosen to suit the size and value of the piece — and the largest travel palletised or by two-person courier, with a delivery day arranged with you rather than left on a doorstep. Mainland UK delivery is included in the price, with duty and VAT already paid — there is nothing to settle with the courier and no customs paperwork in your name. If you would rather collect it, bring the order email to the Loaded Dice shop at 28 Holton Road, Barry CF63 4HD; we bring the piece there once the balance is paid and tell you when it is ready.

If something goes wrong

If the piece arrives damaged or faulty, we put it right at our cost — replacement parts from the studio where possible, collection and a full refund where not. That is the Consumer Rights Act 2015 and nothing on our site reduces it.

If we cannot supply what you reserved — the edition is cancelled, or an allocation we expected does not materialise — you get back everything you have paid, in full, within fourteen days, and we tell you why. Nothing is retained in that case.

If you change your mind, we retain 10% of the price: for a deposit reservation that is your deposit. We would rather write that in bold here than let you discover it in a policy page. The figure is not ours: when you reserve, we place the order for your piece with the manufacturer through our distributor, and once that order is placed we remain liable to them for 10% of it whether or not you go ahead. What we retain is that cost, passed through unchanged, not a fee on top of it. Where a statutory right to cancel applies, it is unaffected — the detail is in our refund policy and the plain-English version is on how reservations work.

What we will not do

  • Invent scarcity. No countdown timers on editions that are not closing, no "3 people are viewing this", no stock numbers we cannot substantiate. When a page says an edition is closing, it is because the order window is closing.
  • Publish a date we have not checked. If we have not verified an estimate, the tracker shows when we last did, and a stage we have not confirmed shows as not confirmed rather than as a guess.
  • Claim protection we do not provide. A separate account is what we have, and we say so — not an escrow, not a trust, not "your money is safe with us", and no insurance we have not bought.
  • Inflate our own numbers. Review counts on this site are the counts you will find if you go and look, and we would rather quote a real one than a flattering one.
  • Quietly rewrite history. Old dates stay struck through. Changes stay logged.

How to check all of this

None of the above is worth much on our own word, so check it. The Companies House record confirms the company, its age and its filings. The VAT number can be verified on the government's VAT checker. Halidom is too new to have reviews of its own, and we will not borrow another business's. And you can telephone 01446 789 088 and speak to someone in the shop, Tuesday to Saturday 10:30–16:30 and Sunday 11:00–15:00, or write to hello@halidom.uk. If you are about to reserve something in four figures, we would rather you rang first.

Questions

Is Halidom a real company?

Halidom is a trading name of Loaded Dice Ltd, company number 12429789, registered in Wales since January 2020 and VAT registered as GB 342132248. The company runs a physical shop in Barry, South Wales, and its filings are public at Companies House.

Is my deposit held in a protected account?

It is held in a separate one. Deposits are moved into a Loaded Dice Ltd bank account used for nothing else and drawn only when your piece ships or a reservation is cancelled; they are not spent on stock or on running the business. It is not an escrow or a trust account, so it would not be protected from the company's creditors if the company failed. The protections that would survive that are Section 75 if you pay the deposit by credit card, and chargeback on a debit card.

What happens if the release date moves?

We update the product page, email everyone holding a reservation, and log the change on the release tracker with the old date struck through. The terms of your reservation do not change, and neither does the price.

What happens if Halidom stops trading before my piece arrives?

Your deposit sits in a separate account, but it is the company's account rather than a trust, so in an insolvency it would be company money. That is why a credit-card payment is your strongest position: Section 75 can make the card issuer jointly liable for the purchase and you would claim from them. This is the honest answer, and it is the reason we suggest paying the deposit on a credit card even though it costs us more.

This page describes how Halidom operates and is not legal advice. The company details are matters of public record; the consumer rights referred to are set out in the Consumer Rights Act 2015, the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013 and the Consumer Credit Act 1974.

Sources

Everything on this page that can be checked against a public record is listed below. If one of them changes, this page is updated and the review date in the byline moves.