This week’s blog is about…wait, hold on one second, I just have to answer a question about shipping.
OK, back. Now where was I? Right, shipping.
If you’ve been following our blogs you know that we are a true start-up. That means everyone wears every hat. Someone needs to design the website? Make it happen Scott! Someone needs to put together a marketing plan? Got get’em Scottie! Someone called in sick and we need someone to pack product? Hey Scott, you’re up! You get the idea.
Nowhere was this more prevalent than in shipping. When we started I tried to handle it all on my own and what I quickly realized was that I never, ever, ever want to be in the logistics business! So we did our diligence and were able to secure a deal with a multi-billion dollar vendor to pack and ship the products in the custom boxes you see today. Even better was that they have a shipping facility only 7 miles from our manufacturing facility so it is very efficient!
We then contracted with Mail Innovations, which is a division of UPS, to handle package tracking. And things were going great! Now, when our customers purchased product they were immediately generated and emailed a tracking number and in an average of 4.7 days were receiving their package and breathing easier with Azuna. Sure we had a hiccup here and there but on the whole we were turning ourselves into a well-oiled machine.
You can probably guess what happened next. Covid. Man, I hate even writing that word. Who knew you could hate a word so much that you had never even heard of five months ago?
Now in Covid world, or what some are calling the new normal, we are seeing emails with tracking numbers that seem to go nowhere. We are seeing deliveries that used to take days take weeks. Overnight has turned into next week. Amazon Prime is now Amazon Sub-Prime. And it seems like supply chains across the country are all incredibly stressed.
Was it just us? Were these growing pains? I didn’t think so but I wasn’t positive so every day for the past two months I have been ordering a new product online from reputable brands that have great online reviews. And while I have gotten some really great products, I’m now fully convinced that the shipping issue is not an Azuna issue. It’s a new normal issue.
And that’s not an excuse. It’s an explanation.
So unfortunately in this crazy Covid, new normal world we’re living in I can’t make the kind of guarantees that I would like to on when product will be delivered.
What I can guarantee is that at Azuna we will all work as hard as possible at creating the best customer experience that we can. And if that means I need to answer a million shipping questions until we can all get back to normal, then I’ll feel blessed to do it.
In closing I want to thank you for your continued support. We are doing everything we can in our power, including increasing staffing, to get you the Azuna you love as quickly as possible. We’ll get better and we’ll all get through this together.
Now if you’ll please excuse me, I have to go answer another question about shipping ☺
