The eight weeks leading up to July 4th is typically a busy time for us and this year did not fall short. In fact, we’ve beaten all of our past records for orders in-house. The last three weeks are our #1, #2, and #3 weeks of all time.
This is exciting for us, particularly because so many of our orders are from long-time customers. It makes us feel good to know we’ve done a good job for you in the past, and that you’ve trusted us once again with your order.
This explosion in business makes us a little worried, though. At the beginning of the year, with the economic conditions as they were, we did not hire as many people nor upgrade our equipment like we normally would. We didn’t know how the economy would affect our industry, our customers, and our business. We braced for the worst and, by playing it safe, we have created a new problem.
While we are doing everything we can to keep up with business and provide excellent service to each and every customer, we know we could be doing better. Even with most of us coming in early each day, staying late most nights, and working on the weekends, it simply hasn’t been enough. We’ve read your surveys and emails and we know that we aren’t doing as good a job as normal of keeping you informed about the status of your order. We’re shipping your orders out faster than normal to reach deadlines and, for a few orders this summer, we haven’t met your deadlines. For that we are truly sorry.
Even our
online t-shirt designer was affected. We simply never tested it under the kind of traffic it has been receiving and it turned out there was a bottleneck that caused it to break when there were too many people designing t-shirts at the same time. That’s fixed now, and we’re planning more upgrades to speed it up.
Please know that we are adding more staff every week and training people as quickly as we can to accommodate the increased business. We’re not accepting rush or priority orders until we are back on our normal schedule. We are also planning on equipment upgrades to do a better job during our next busy season.
We view this as an opportunity and we’ll spare no expense to increase our capacity as quickly as possible. We are working hard to continue to earn your loyalty and trust.