It's the end of September, and we've been running Libris Arcana for nearly 4 months now. This time of the month is supposed to be crunch time for getting out orders. I should be furiously working, cracking the whip on our shop goblins, packing up our subscription DND dice sets, and getting Dice Day envelopes out the door.
I SHOULD be.
Instead I'm drafting apology emails and explanatory blogs, because our dice are late. Again.
If you look closely at those dice pictured above, you'll see that the inking is a critical miss no matter what number is showing. It's splotchy and uneven. There are obvious bare areas where the resin shows through. We could not in good conscience ship DND dice looking like that. (Note: These are not our current RPG dice sets, just an example set with the same issue.)
This is actually the same quality problem that held up our July orders. It has been fixed, but we are still playing catchup from the scramble to find a new inking facility.
Honestly I'm really grateful to our suppliers for being so on top of quality and catching these before they shipped them to us in the US. That would have been an even bigger disaster. With their help, we are able to deliver a fantastic product--the high-quality, custom, limited-edition resin RPG dice sets that you dice goblins expect and deserve.
But that doesn't change the fact that our dice are late. Again.
We should be receiving September's dice before the end of October (which were ordered back in June mind you), and we'll likely ship them out along with our (hopefully on time) October orders. So about a month late!
Ugh.
Image courtesy of Yogendra Singh on Unsplash.com.
We took over Libris Arcana back in June with a head of steam and ton of ideas on how to grow this business. Since then, we've implemented almost none of those ideas and instead have had to concentrate all of our efforts on quality and getting a good grip on our service lines--in particular our subscription service.
And that's absolutely what we should be doing. All the growth strategy & community building & marketing genius in the world won't help if we're putting out a poor product with poor service. We have to get this right!
But it's also frustrating and feels like we're spinning our wheels.
I have some experience in e-commerce, so there are a lot of pieces of this business where I feel right at home. BUT... overseas manufacturing and importing physical products ain't one of them. This has been a learning experience, and we are committed to growing and doing better.
So along with September's dice, we should be receiving our October & November dice. The December & January dice are already in production, and we'll be ordering February next month. So we're really (really, really, really, really) hoping that this will be the last month like this.
It's frustrating the heck out of us, so we know it must be frustrating to our customers. All we can say is we're sorry. And hang with us please, because there are great things to come with this company and with this RPG community.
Until next time...
Is it Dice Day yet?
How about now?
Now?!!!
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