Transit Times- Our goal moving forward is to have all plants shipped within ten days of the order date, period.
We have spent a lot of time this month looking at how we can do better in this area of our business and we have some new practices that we are putting into place to make the experience for our customers a smoother one than it has been in the past. We are confident that these changes will not only make us faster, but we feel it will be hands down the best in the industry.
Fulfillment Practices- We are happy to share with you one of the changes we're making internally. It will affect packaging a little, but only in good ways.
You will notice in the coming weeks that your plants will start to ship with an identification stake, this stake will have key information on it; the plant name and our sku given to your exact plant. This sku will act as an ID number that will be searchable via our website so you can easily access the original listing at any point in the future should the need arise to review it. Access to the original listing will give you insights to what the plant looked like at the time she was sold to you, the date of listing and any specific plant care advice we have learned for that particular cultivar.
What this does for us in terms of fulfillment enhancements is it allows us to stop using the printed tape you have seen on your little twined boxes. That tape is printed in house by hand and takes a significant amount of time. We found it to be charming and it's a touch we hate to lose, but we need to look at the bigger picture and now that the plants are shipping with ID stakes we need to be realistic about the time it takes us to package. There will always be hand touches included with our packaging, your business and support mean a lot to us, but this particular one is going away.
With the practices we had in place, just around the tape alone, we were not able to prep boxes ahead of schedule and every single outgoing box had to be prepared on demand at the time of shipping. It was a time crunch that hurt our fulfillment times. It doesn't seem like it would take that long, but when you're doing the kind of volume we're doing that simple little touch adds many hours every week and it's a step that can't be done until shipping because we have no way of knowing what will be in the box before the orders come in. This simple change alone will help to speed up our packaging times significantly (and it's not the only change we're making internally).
These ID stakes have been a big undertaking and not without significant cost. The size of stakes we're using is something that is custom made just for our store (we want nondescript, discrete stakes) and we're still waiting on the dies, but they are coming in the next few weeks. The stakes will be professionally printed, just like what you see at your favorite local nursery (just much, much smaller), and will be UV and water resistant.