Hello all,
We want to take this time to wish you all a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year. 2023 was a whirlwind to say the least. For those of you who had difficulty with orders this past year, we want to offer not only our apologies but an explanation of the changes we have made to ensure a better experience for you and our new customers in the year to come.
First off, this blog will serve as a news update for everything Spiral. We are going to use this as a sort of bulletin board to help keep you updated on the changes taking place in the years to come. Here are a few of the biggies for 2024.
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Supply in 2023: We understand many of you had difficulty getting orders fulfilled at the end of the year. This was partly due to the 41% drop in wholesale sales seen across the entire gift industry from late spring to early fall. We were no exception. The lower order levels prompted us as, well as other manufacturers in the gift industry, to scale back on our material orders as many grew uncertain about the economic outlook. Unfortunately this lead to tight supply towards the end of the year as we saw record sales from the end of October on. Some of our suppliers were caught off guard as well and this lead to a shortage of some of our scent oils late in the year. We apologize and will try to increase stock earlier in the year for 2024 to prevent this from happening again.
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Wholesale sales reps: As many of you know, in late 2023 it was decided that we would not continue our relationship with our national sales organizations and bring all ordering and customer service in-house. While it is hard to say goodbye to some really great people who helped get us where we are today, it became a necessity as increasing showroom rents and fees associated with maintaining the relationship simply did not allow us to continue selling wholesale at the price price point we hope to maintain. You can see a summary of all the ways you can continue to order from us outlined here or by clicking on the ordering options at the top of every page on our site.
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Real Time Inventory: In an effort to prevent long waits for order fulfillments missing one product, we are taking our real time inventory online for the first time. Starting in January 2024, the easy ordering tool will provide real time inventory to let you place orders for immediate shipping. This will be true for Faire as well. This simply was not possible when we were accepting purchase orders from outside sale reps and the process to update was onerous and time consuming. If a product is out of stock, you can still order those items in advance but we ask that you submit those orders via email, fax or phone as we will manually put them in the system with the fulfillment date.
This is all for the first update. Look for more coming soon as we get into the scent changes for 2024.
Warmest Regards,
Todd & Tammi Nelson
