I thought they had been in business longer than that ... when did Gridseeds come out? I remember considering getting LTC miners from them a long while back, has it only been half a year? I suppose I thought they were around when I could still use a BFL Single to mine ... I forget they are a lot more recent.
Gridseeds came out in January I think. GAW started selling them in March. In August, i.e. 5 months later they started the hashlet thing.
tf, not all of their sales were drop shipped. They did some distribution here in the US, and their current datacenter in Hattiesburg seems to have started as a shipping warehouse.
They did fail quite miserably though with the logistics. Couldn't quite master how to ship on time or how to handle returns or how to provide customer support.