If you’re a fan of colorful enameled copper rings, you’ve probably noticed that certain colors—in fact, many of the most popular colors—have been MIA for quite some time. We wanted to take a moment to let you know what’s going on.
The issue with EC right now is bigger than Blue Buddha. In fact chainmaille manufacturers all over the world are experiencing the same out of stock, missing color issues as we are. The reason? The problems stem from the wire itself. This wire is only made by a very, VERY small number of manufacturers. Creating enameled copper wire is quite challenging (particularly in large spools that suppliers like B3 need) and, with changeovers in ownership of one of the major manufacturers, there has been a bit of a learning curve happening which has affected many of your favorite bright colors for the last several months.
Like many other suppliers, we started to wonder what the future of these rings would be. As artists, we can’t imagine not being able to use enameled copper rings in our pieces. As a business, we can’t ignore the frustration it continues to cause our customers who have put projects and even commissions on hold while we wait to see what happens with these rings. Feeling torn, we’ve started talking with other suppliers about their experiences and with the wire manufacturers to better understand where they are with the trouble-shooting process. It’s really important to us to do as thorough of an investigation into this as we can so that we can empower you to better understand the product and work with you, our customers, to figure out what we should do if we need to make major changes to what we can offer.
In the meantime, we are talking with smaller suppliers who we’re considering recommending for certain colors. These suppliers create smaller batches of jump rings from significantly smaller spools of the wire which have not had the same trouble as the large spools. We will certainly keep you updated with what we learn in this process and will open up the conversation more directly if we need to make some big changes.
The astute mailler has probably also noticed that our anodized aluminum stock situation hasn’t been much better than the EC. We are going through similar trouble-shooting in this area with the ultimate goal of course to keep our AA in stock all the time. You can expect another post within the next week or so with some insight into this issue and an invitation to join the conversation about how best to solve the kinks that cause it.
We are really passionate about creating these rings 100% in the USA and we are equally passionate about the quality of them. What we are working on however is how to keep all these things we are passionate about, but streamline the process so we can get batches of perfect rings consistently. More about this in the coming blog post…
I have noticed that the anodized aluminum colors and mixes that I prefer have been difficult to get from B3. I’ve tried some other sources but either their rings aren’t as bright and/or shiny as yours or they don’t have the range of colors you used to have. I had thought that you sold them all at recent shows, and had no idea there was a supplier problem. Have you considered buying your own wire supplier?