As our backlog grows, we are working as hard as we can and are committed to filling all your orders
So … you placed an order at the beginning of January, and as any reasonable person would, you’re starting to wonder what’s going on and if you’ll ever get your order. The first part is tricky and long to explain (see below), but the short answer is YES – you will get your order! We will be restocking nearly all of our (metal) rings before we close down so that we can fill your orders.
If your order is #83424 or less and hasn’t yet shipped, it’s probably in one of these piles:
Those are all the orders that are in our “problem” pile – meaning something was out of stock when we went to fill it. Aimee is going through those orders one by one to create backorders. Some might not turn into backorders; we are in the process of measuring and tumbling 135 lbs of aluminum rings (and a little bit of copper and jewelry brass) to take care of some of these problem orders. We’re not putting any of this new batch of rings back on the website until all current orders have been filled.
In the meantime, we’ve queued up production on our next batch of rings for subsequent orders. We’ve also printed a huge picklist for the next 100 orders and are in the process of prepping those.
We are committed to filling all the orders we can (as the rubber goes out of stock, those purchases will be refunded, since we are turning our rubber line over to Spiderchain.com). We’ll be receiving 5 million anodized aluminum rings in late February and will be restocking several hundred more pounds of most of our base metal sizes too.
Why is the backlog so big?
The problem (which I realize may not make a difference to your frustration level, but I figure it won’t hurt to explain) is that we do not have a complete back-end inventory system. We were hoping to set one up this year. Its a complex project due to the nature of one particular ring size/color having the potential to “exist” in many places at once. For instance, our stock of 50,000 F18 aluminum rings could exist as part of a 50 pack, or 250 pack, or other pack sizes, or in many, many kits. We don’t pre-make our kits because we realized it tied up too much inventory that otherwise could be sold as loose packs, and plus, we like to offer the customization to you, which we can’t do if we pre-make kits.
This inventory feature is not something off-the-shelf e-commerce solutions do as part of their regular offering, so it was going to require a lot of customization and investment on our part, and we never quite had the money to spend on it.
This is a long way of saying that we don’t have a way of automatically knowing when we are out of stock of something. Normally it’s not a big deal because we have 1-2 day order processing times, so we can move items from our “backstock” area to our warehouse and then re-order or manufacture the low-stock item … but once we were swamped with orders, we just couldn’t keep up, and sometimes we received additional orders for out-of-stock items before we knew they were out of stock. 
Essentially, getting so many orders at once really broke our system. Now we’re working to prep all the aluminum rings for 50-100 orders at once; then the copper rings; then jewelry brass and so on. Overall this is faster than trying to pick each order one by one (or trying to tackle the entire order queue at once). It also means we spend a couple days picking and then we have a day where we ship a ton of orders at once. And then the cycle starts again. It’s not pretty, but it’s getting the job done slowly but surely.
I want to apologize deeply for the delay. We’ve been working as hard as we can, and it’s been difficult to keep up; we’re so sorry we haven’t been able to deliver the level of care our customers know and appreciate. Thank you so much for your patience through all this.
Your products are worth the wait. Later this year we will all be in serious BBB withdrawal ! Rebeca, is your next adventure going to include chain mailers rehab for us?