Hey guys! We'll be shipping again next week! So excited to be boxing up plants!!! We have been working on getting to know our stake machine a little better this week and we wanted to make your acquaintance with this latest feature of ours as well. 

So, I get it... It doesn't look like much. But guys... this means everything to us in fulfillment. It allows us to pre-print our stakes on the same day the orders are placed with our farms, then when our boxes are processed through receiving each individual plant will have a preprinted stake that they are stored with on our holding racks, ensuring you get the exact plant that was photographed. (FYI, we were doing all of this manually before, not only was it super time consuming, but the pencil and paper method can also introduce human error). 

So this allows us to skip that little piece of tape that we normally put on the top of your box. That is a little hand touch that we will miss, but it means we will be able to expedite shipping and fulfillment and as a result be able to offer more selection. 

And it provides something of real value to you as well. That little bit of info will let you know where your plant came from, its formal name and our internal ID. You can input that ID into the search bar and it will pull up your original listing, along with the date we listed your plant and the grower photos. For example, this stake was for a plant that I personally own, you can check out her stats by inputting that ID # in the search bar: 0420012

Now, it's not everything that we had hoped it would be. It is still an ink-based solution, albeit thermal ink and a fancy machine. We are still working out kinks. It's pretty good, but if you give it an exceptionally hard wipe the ink will smear. It is touted as being waterproof and I have run it under a faucet and it's fine. You don't need to protect them from sun or water, but you cannot wipe them off with a cloth or they will smear a bit. We will eventually move to a purely thermal-based id solution, but for now these are still really nice little tags and we're super excited to start shipping our plants this way. It's a huge step in the right direction for everyone involved. 

We will be continuing with our lavendar bags. I know that is something you guys love and, heck, our office smells like heaven, so that's a win-win for everyone. These are never guaranteed, sometimes we run out, but we try to keep these stocked at all times. During the holidays we move to cedar-filled bags, keeping in line with our namesake. We get a lot of questions about these. These are just little gifts to show you that we appreciate you. No strings attached, except the ones that close the bags ;)

You may see changes to your packaging as well. We are changing up our packaging slightly, we will still double box and keep all of our protective measures, but we may be playing around with logo imprints and specific box sizing over the next few months. We're working to get our packaging right where we want it, so if you see changes we're playing with our look and feel right now. 

Overall we're super excited about the internal changes we're making and hope you are too. We can't wait to start shipping your plant mail again next week!! 

-Crystal