We’re still working hard to fill your orders, we promise!
Now that our Chicago storefront is winding down, I have a moment to breathe and update you on what’s going on with online orders. I know many of you are becoming increasingly frustrated with us these days, and I want to apologize to you.
First off, I want to assure you that we have EVERY intention of filling every order … and those we cannot fill because stock has run out, we will refund your money. Even if it’s just me, working by myself for weeks after all the employees have left, I WILL make sure everyone is taken care of. I’ve run an honest and honorable business for 13 years, and plan on being honest and honorable right through the end.
Under ordinary circumstances, I agree that our customer care right now is unacceptable. But these aren’t ordinary circumstances. We’re going out of business. We have one single customer care person to attend to hundreds of customer emails, phone calls and backorders. Aimee is fantastic, but there’s only so much one person can do. And unfortunately we’re not in a situation right now to find, hire and train extra customer care people. Recently Aimee was out sick, and the rest of the staff is so stretched thin, none of us could step in to cover her. Honestly, I feel guilty and terrible about it, but I also knew that I simply didn’t have the energy to add extra hours to my workload either. We’re not trying to screw you guys, we’re just trying to keep our heads above water.
I know this isn’t helpful for people who’ve placed an order and haven’t received it, or can’t download purchased PDFs, or who’ve emailed customer care with a question and haven’t heard back. You’re frustrated, I get it. Please believe that we are doing the very best we can. I’ve never seen my staff work so hard. We order from vendors too, so we know what it’s like to have to wait and wait and not receive satisfactory responses as to when something will be back in stock, or to find out something is being discontinued.
We are having some extra helpers come in to help bag/label rings in order to make sure orders can get out a little quicker. If this isn’t proof that I put my customers before myself, I don’t know what is. (Because getting these extra workers means we’re adding even more debt to the business. If all I cared about was taking your money, believe me, I wouldn’t be bringing on extra ring baggers!)
All I can do is ask your continued patience and forgiveness for the massive delays, and slowly but surely everyone will be taken care of.
Will you restock?
We’ve been hearing this question a lot lately. Some items will NOT be restocked, namely rubber (which is being taken over by Spiderchain) and niobium (which I believe is all sold out as of this writing). We ARE planning on restocking anodized aluminum and most sizes of base metal.
We already have some base metal ready to go, but our first priority is filling all the backorders. We decided that we are going to wait until we’ve received all our anodized aluminum from the anodizer to put ALL the jump rings back online at once. This way, you don’t have to place several small orders as stuff trickles back in stock.
It also allows us time to put our jump rings on counters so that we don’t oversell. Now, the caveat to that is that, unfortunately, our system doesn’t automatically mark an item as “out of stock” when its counter goes down to zero. We have to go in manually, find items that have 0 remaining, and change their status from “active” to “out of stock.” Naturally, this is difficult to keep up with so it means that sometimes you’ll add something to your cart and it will disappear or wont’ show up. This means there’s none left, but we haven’t yet been able to change its status to “out of stock.” We apologize, as we know this isn’t convenient. We just don’t have the resources to do anything about it right now.
We hope you’ll continue to bear with us over the next 6 weeks as we bust our humps to get millions of jump rings into your hands!
Rebecca Rudaski
