West Coast Armoury New Years Update.
Posted: Sun Jan 06, 2008 11:28 am
Well since the previous posts got erased, I'll rewrite the New Years update again.
The holidays are over, thank goodness, so it's back into the shop hopefully distractions for the next month. A close friend of the family died the Thursday before Xmas, so there was much drama to be had. Fortunately we pulled off Christmas and everyone had a good time here for the Xmas and New years gatherings. We even managed to buy a new work truck during all of the mayhem so I'll be travelling to a lot more events this year.
First, with the New Year will come a change in focus for the armoury. We will be shifting gears, once again, to try and better serve our customers and better the business. Starting immediately we will no longer be accepting open custom work orders. We'll still do some custom pieces, but they will be very, very few in number. This last year I worked on a lot of custom orders. While I love making cool new things, every custom order, no matter how small the change, has taken much longer than expected to make. The custom pieces have really pushed the schedule back for everything, so that even simple pieces are taking months to clear in an attempt to work on things "in order".
So, once again we are shifting our focus to clearing our current backlog while offering a set lineup of products and building up some in stock pieces. We'll be offering and focusing on just select performance pieces, that way it'll be much easier to keep things flowing smoothly. By avoiding too many custom pieces we can get our delivery times way down, build up stock and avoid a lot of the delays and pitfalls associated with taking custom backorders. So hopefully by the end of January we should have the bulk of the backorders cleared and even some items in stock again.
Second, I'd like to thank everyone who helped make 2007 a great year. Through all of the craziness of the wedding, injuries, illness, fires and drama, we still had a good year and it's in no small part due to our friends and customers. Special thanks to those patient folks who waited for their gear and the few that are still waiting. Starting now the wait times will be much lower as I will not be taking weeks on a custom piece and holding up the whole line. Thanks to all those who helped get us through this last year and to those who will be with us during this next year. 2008 is going to be an amazing year.
Third, we'll be changing up the website here shortly and the new year will bring all sorts of new opportunities. I am going to do away with the OS commerce driven part of the site as it has not proven as useful as I had hoped. We'll be focusing on offering a select lineup of our sport armour and helms, preferring to specialize on what we do best instead of trying to offer "everything". The business email will probably change as well and be hosted by Google, Yahoo, or similar outfit as they are better set up to filter out the hundreds of spam emails we get daily.
Now on to a small update. With the holidays work ground to a near halt from just before Xmas to after New years. This last week we did manage to ship out 9 sets of the sport gauntlets and I finally finished up the totenkoph I had on the short list. I'll post a few pictures here. Communications will be spotty until the end of this next week as I will be buried in the shop with little to no time for the computer.
Once again, thanks for a great 2007! With a lot of hard work 2008 will be even better!
-Brand
The holidays are over, thank goodness, so it's back into the shop hopefully distractions for the next month. A close friend of the family died the Thursday before Xmas, so there was much drama to be had. Fortunately we pulled off Christmas and everyone had a good time here for the Xmas and New years gatherings. We even managed to buy a new work truck during all of the mayhem so I'll be travelling to a lot more events this year.
First, with the New Year will come a change in focus for the armoury. We will be shifting gears, once again, to try and better serve our customers and better the business. Starting immediately we will no longer be accepting open custom work orders. We'll still do some custom pieces, but they will be very, very few in number. This last year I worked on a lot of custom orders. While I love making cool new things, every custom order, no matter how small the change, has taken much longer than expected to make. The custom pieces have really pushed the schedule back for everything, so that even simple pieces are taking months to clear in an attempt to work on things "in order".
So, once again we are shifting our focus to clearing our current backlog while offering a set lineup of products and building up some in stock pieces. We'll be offering and focusing on just select performance pieces, that way it'll be much easier to keep things flowing smoothly. By avoiding too many custom pieces we can get our delivery times way down, build up stock and avoid a lot of the delays and pitfalls associated with taking custom backorders. So hopefully by the end of January we should have the bulk of the backorders cleared and even some items in stock again.
Second, I'd like to thank everyone who helped make 2007 a great year. Through all of the craziness of the wedding, injuries, illness, fires and drama, we still had a good year and it's in no small part due to our friends and customers. Special thanks to those patient folks who waited for their gear and the few that are still waiting. Starting now the wait times will be much lower as I will not be taking weeks on a custom piece and holding up the whole line. Thanks to all those who helped get us through this last year and to those who will be with us during this next year. 2008 is going to be an amazing year.
Third, we'll be changing up the website here shortly and the new year will bring all sorts of new opportunities. I am going to do away with the OS commerce driven part of the site as it has not proven as useful as I had hoped. We'll be focusing on offering a select lineup of our sport armour and helms, preferring to specialize on what we do best instead of trying to offer "everything". The business email will probably change as well and be hosted by Google, Yahoo, or similar outfit as they are better set up to filter out the hundreds of spam emails we get daily.
Now on to a small update. With the holidays work ground to a near halt from just before Xmas to after New years. This last week we did manage to ship out 9 sets of the sport gauntlets and I finally finished up the totenkoph I had on the short list. I'll post a few pictures here. Communications will be spotty until the end of this next week as I will be buried in the shop with little to no time for the computer.
Once again, thanks for a great 2007! With a lot of hard work 2008 will be even better!
-Brand
