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The Wall Street Journal recently wrote a story that totally resonated with us.
The article discussed an email from the founder of Graza - an eCommerce Olive Oil company - that was sent to their customer list - about 35,000 people. In the email, the founder did something that most businesses don't do often. He apologized.
According to his letter, the holidays had gotten away from Graza and demand for their product totally outmatched their supply and their ability to deliver on their promise. Many orders were delayed, missing the holiday deadlines, and when orders were received, they were often damaged or mis-packaged.
This resonates with us, as we are currently experiencing a very similar issue.
As it stands today, there about 200 of you who are currently waiting on your Recipe Journal - My Secret Ingredient - to be delivered. Some of you have been waiting for a few days, and some of you have been waiting for a month.
It all started back on December 11.
On this day, the way in which we manage our inventory levels across our website and wholesale platform failed us (and we failed to realize). For example, if we showed that we had 100 units in inventory, and we sold 5 units on our website + 50 units to boutiques and retail stores, our inventory still showed 95 units (as opposed to 45). We use a software tool to connect all of the dots, and for a period of time, that software tool was no better than the chicken-scratch in my notebook.
At this point in time, inventory was already pretty low given increased holiday demand, and after a few days, we finally realized that we had an error in our inventory system (because we had no inventory to ship!) and we were in a deep hole.
Immediately (December 14-16) - we contact our supplier to find out what our production queue looks like. All was good, but we needed a miracle. Fortunately, we had already begun a new production run of this particular product, however, given the holiday factory slow-down, we realized it would be a few weeks before some people received their orders.
We sent emails, we sent texts, and we posted a disclaimer on our product page (Still live today) to inform customers of the delay. We discounted the product by $5.00, and we responded to every inbound customer service request within a few hours.
As it stands today, we are now shipping orders, but we are still very behind. We hold ourselves to high standards, and this is totally unacceptable. For that, we are sorry.
For those of you who don't know, I (Mike) personally ship every order out of our NYC office. We don't use a 3PL, and we don't have a big team. It's just Me, Pooja, Alden, and Portia involved in the business, and for the most part - I own the fulfillment side of the business.
It's going to take us a week or two to get back to normal, but we can promise that we working on it. We can also promise that this product, My Secret Ingredient, is worth the wait. It's an incredible product, and we stand behind it 100%. Our moms (who are great cooks) helped us design it, and since we launched it early this year, we've sold thousands.
Home-chefs, professional-chefs, cooking stores, boutiques, grandmothers, and grandkids. Everyone wants one, and it's worth the wait.
If you are one of the 200+ people waiting, we hope you'll forgive us, and we hope you'll extend us a few more days of patience. If you'd like a refund instead, respond to this email and we'll issue a refund no questions asked.
If you are reading this newsletter and you are wondering what the hype is around this Recipe Journal, we hope you'll order one today. We'll get it to you when we get it to you 🙂
Ultimately, this is a good problem to have, and we are learning from our mistakes. We'll be better because of it, and we are grateful for the opportunity to deliver a great product to you.
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