Current status of Sweatshirts and The Gilded Teafling's growth
We are hard at work getting orders for EPIC: The Musical Limited Edition Sweatshirts shipped to Winions across the world. We know how excited you are to get your sweatshirts, and we are unbelievably excited to get them to you!
Our little team has grown exponentially to tackle the many logistical challenges of shipping nearly 100,000 sweatshirts to over 100 countries all across the world.
We have procured warehouse space; hired a phenomenal fulfillment team, as well as a customer service team who have been answering all of your questions and concerns (thank you Katrina, Sin, and Erin!)
When fulfillment started at the beginning of this month, we shared that our goal was to ship 5,000 orders per week, and that we were working to get that count even higher. While our fulfillment team has been doing an absolutely amazing job, ongoing freight bottlenecks have made this goal difficult to achieve.
As you may or may not know, there is a nationwide shortage of freight truck drivers which has led to a number of delayed shipments in getting sweatshirts to our warehouse. On top of this, we are experiencing some challenges with getting the appropriate size sweatshirts delivered to our warehouse, which has caused us to deviate from our plan slightly in order to run through all the sizes we have at our warehouse. We are still fulfilling orders by customers who ordered first, but now we are also pairing this with what available sizes we have in our warehouse.
Despite these challenges, we are immensely proud that we have managed to ship over 15,000 orders! We are still working on orders from December and early January.
So here’s what we have planned on our side to minimize freight problems, and get more orders out the door faster:
📦 More warehouse space.
Our current warehouse space is a little smaller than we’d like. Although we are in love with it, it can’t fit as many shirts as we like. Luckily we were able to close on an additional suite in the same building allowing us to expand our operation without needing to completely revamp our fulfillment process.
More space + No downtime = More Shirts, Faster.
This will also let us receive even more shipments and store them without running out of space. Our plan is to get ALL the sweatshirts to our facility so we don't have to bother with scheduling deliveries throughout the fulfillment process.
👥 Hiring additional fulfillment staff.
As much as our warehouse staff loves working together, some elbow room is necessary to keep personal spaces… well, personal. The extra warehouse space gives us said elbow room to hire more staff and pack even more orders!
With these improvements, we will have a lot more flexibility to deal with challenges that come our way.
What to look forward to
So, with the logistics update out of the way, here’s a bit more of what else is coming very soon:
Custom Mailers
We just received our super cool custom packaging featuring the EPIC logo and our beloved Teafling. If you haven’t yet received your order, you will most likely be getting it in these cool new mailers! If you already received your order in our “plain” mailers, hopefully getting your order sooner was a sufficient consolation prize!
Additional In Person Sweatshirt Sales
If you happen to be in the Seattle area this spring, you will be able to find us at conventions, including Emerald City Comic Con and Sakura Con, where we will have a limited number of EPIC sweatshirts for sale that we purchased specifically for in-person events! So come say hi! (You may also discover a few other EPIC related surprises in store 👀)
More To Come…?
The limited run EPIC sweatshirt has been an incredible opportunity for our little business to learn and grow in ways that we never could’ve imagined when we began. We are immensely grateful to Jay, the EPIC crew, and everyone one of you Winions for your boundless grace and support.
While we aren’t ready to announce what is coming next, we are hard at work on other projects behind the scenes that we are shaking with excitement to share with the Winions of the world. ⭐
From the bottom of our hearts, thank you for being an amazing community and trusting us with this project. ♥️