So, where exactly IS everything?
People often think if you run a lingerie brand your life must be full of very creative stuff. In fact its mostly organising the flow of boxes, money, and people. The boxes usually contain knickers. We did once put one of our people in a box, but it didn’t work out very well. In our defence, it had been a very long and quite boring day.
Anyway, generally the aim is to exchange money for boxes and then said boxes for (hopefully) rather more money. Anything else is classed somewhere in the region of “fail”.
Recently, we had what can only be described as major fail. In Spring, we started looking for a new factory for our styles, because the exchange rate (when you make in China you buy in USD, so the pound/dollar rate is a problem for us) and price hikes had meant if we stayed we’d either have to switch to doing retail or put our prices up by lots.
We also decided that we’d do a new style or release every month rather than two drops of stock a year. So, we found a factory that could meet our quality standards and our price, sampled stuff (though by this point we were already late by fashion standards, which prefers you to do stuff a year in advance), and made orders through to next May.
Aaaannd then there are a series of disasters/delays I won’t bore you with, the final one being, the factory contact us to say they are cancelling all the orders from this month onwards. Essentially, we’ve been gazumped – a biggercustomer has come along so they have dumped us in favour of them.
Now this is a major problem you see, because even without the problem of what we do from December (we moved, its all sorted) , the way you hurry someone up is to point out that you can cancel all your other orders with them. Without that you don’t have a huge amount of leverage when making overseas. So we’ve been playing manufacturing chicken; they had our deposit, but there comes a point where is financially a disaster not to complete our stuff, despite this. So for a while they threatened not to make it if we pestered,and we threatened not to pay them if it didn’t turn up soon. . . we thought this was sorted finally about two weeks ago, and sent over the money. At which point they decided to not bother packing it. Fantastic.
So that was the story of how we ended up with all our boxes and all our money in the wrong place entirely. The good news is, that after a few more kerfuffles, it should all now be in the UK – just in time for us to take it to the Erotica show, which is a huge relief! You can find 5 new styles there, at a special show goers discount as always. And its arrived before all my hair fell out with the stress, which is nice. I can only hope that this is also the case for our retailers and patient fans.
Some of our more canny retailers have bought up alot of the stock in advance though, so if you are looking for the black Vargas dress, you should check out our stockists list this weekend!