Week of April 26th and Week of May 3rd
It hasn't been an easy few weeks.
There has been a production bottleneck effect happening right now, so our popular items have been ordered so we can restock them, but they're behind schedule in getting them to us because of how many we ordered, errors, etc.
One solution might be to order more quantities of a certain SKU, but to order less SKUs. However, that doesn't work with some of our items. For example, a hard enamel pin with the factories we work with takes forever. So if we bump up hard enamels from 300 per order to 1000, and order 12 SKUs of one property, that's now 12,000 hard enamel pins from a single order, which will disrupt production for the entire factory, causing massive delays all around.
So we're starting to fret because we're unable to meet up with demand.
You know how people get mad at Sony, Microsoft, or Nintendo, for not being able to meet demand? How they should've prepared for all of this, they knew better?
Boy oh boy, I went from agreeing with those fans to understanding what these billion dollar companies are going through, because we're really struggling ourselves! And it's only May. It's not even prep for the holiday season.
This is also likely why at the Toy Fair, people go and place a single order that's for their entire year. Production can take forever to get all the orders to market, and by the time the toy is ready, it's Halloween. Despite the order being placed in February.
Just know, that we're trying our hardest to both fix this, but to not burn out the workers manufacturing these things for us. It stresses me out just talking about them on the phone with my contact to be like, "Look, I ordered this pin in January, it's now over four month since the order---What is going on? But please don't overwork your people."
Earlier this week I also got into a bad argument with one of the companies we work with... It didn't go well. I want to rant and get into more detail, but I really shouldn't on a public blog. Just know it happened, and it left a sour taste in my mouth.
Also May 3rd was my birthday. So now I'm a year closer to death, so that's nice. :P
Onto next week!