Makers Gotta Make: Switching to Fulfillment Shipping
You've probably gotten dozens of updates from businesses on how they're making changes to navigate the new challenges brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Makes sense, because business owners want you to know they're being safe and care about their employees. We sure do! It's vitally important that we do our best to avoid getting sick, especially as a small team of seven people.
To reduce potential exposure, we've brainstormed solutions to keep things running smoothly and have as few people working in the studio as possible. Working from home is only an option for a few of us. To help protect our studio employees, we're moving everybody to candle production — the most important part of our business — and have recently transitioned to using a fulfillment center to ship our orders.
The switch happened on June 1st. If you've placed an order this month, you probably noticed the package looked different than before. There are undoubtedly going to be some kinks we have to work out during this transition, and we apologize if you receive a damaged item or incorrect order. I keep thinking about that Etsy "uh oh" error page and feel like this is going to be a brief time of three-armed sweaters.
But! We're working with the fulfillment center to package up our items correctly and ensure that items arrive safely to you, so please let us know if that isn't the case and we will get you sorted out. Thank you for your patience and understanding — we truly are so lucky to have such supportive customers. 😊
Using the fulfillment center means we'll no longer have to spend half of our time and energy on shipping. It will allow us to restock more inventory — including our 2oz and 4oz tins — and help prevent items from selling out. Items currently sold out will be restocked next week. Look forward to our Wizardy House candles in July as well as more Bring it Back scents — stay tuned!
Doing our own shipping in-house was always a bottle-neck in operations and caused a lot of headaches. It feels great to rearrange our work space and get back some of our time. Now we'll be able to do more one-off items and bookish merch. You've been requesting more swag items like tees and mugs and enamel pins forever and now we're finally going to be able to make them!
Another benefit is that our online shop will be able to stay open if there is another "Stay at Home" order in Minnesota. The fulfillment center is an essential business and can keep shipping out orders if we have to close our studio again. We'll also be able to keep our shop open throughout the year, even during the holidays.
We're very excited about this transition and how it's going to let us focus on what we do best: making awesome nerdy things that need to exist. For more information regarding changes due to COVID-19 check out our updates page.
