Excuses and business

I'm not sure how many businesses out there get an influx of orders that simply and fully sets them back about a week.

Add on top of that capital problems... moving to a new 'facility'... and the problems you'd love to have in business become real world problems that stress you out and make doing your job that much harder.

Well, Soapier has had such a hiccup!

If you read in our earlier post the outpouring of support that we received... you'll see that we've gotten in excess of 500 orders in less than two weeks.

That, in and of itself, is incredible.

The problem is... for all intents and purposes, there are only two people working on all of those orders. Namely, my mom and my sister.

So, first, we had to purchase soap base. We had used what we had in stock to get out wholesale orders that were placed during the transition period.

The soap base company wouldn't ship our order out because we paid with paypal. We had quite a few customers pay via paypal, so since the money was there, that's how we paid.

Unfortunately, for some unknown reason that even the paypal people could not explain, they decided to hold the money we had sent for 24hours. Thus, our supplier would not ship our product.

Hiccup #1.

So, I had to get every cent I could scrape together, and pay for the soap. It was basically all the money I had. And it wasn't a ton of money.

So, they refund the paypal money, ship the product. Crisis averted. I get my money back once paypal clears to my mom's account... yay... and my sister goes through the arduous task of creating soap for, then, 375 orders.

Now, let me explain.

Each loaf of soap yields 12 slices of soap. So, depending on the complexity of the soap being ordered... creating a loaf of soap can take anywhere from 20 minutes to about six hours.

Not six hours of sitting there waiting for the soap to harden... but six hours before you can use an insert, say for Sweet Pea:



Every one of those swirls has to be created first as a long bar of soap. Figure there's six different colors... then you have to curl the slices... this one is probably our most complex soap.

So, she's making soap. My mom's making soap. Florida, at the time, was baking from some serious heat. They're working with no AC. It's pretty crazy.

So, now we have product to ship. People who ordered two bars, one bar... we're able to get these out quicker than ones that ordered 10 bars. Only because we're trying to get the soaps out as quickly as possible.

Enter paypal, again.

We are printing the majority of all of our labels through paypal's shipping center. But the downloaded excel spreadsheet from our shopping cart won't merge with paypal. So, my mom is entering addresses one at a time. And on a pc, she's having trouble switching windows so that she can see the info, then type it in, then go back, what state, ok, then what zip, crap there's an apartment #...

Then the news story hits. And that takes a full day away from soap making. It's funny. Just over 1 minute of news coverage, and it took four hours.

Now, for those business owners out there who are stubborn and know it... you'll know that the majority of the time, handing over the reigns to someone, when you only trust yourself to do it right... this can hurt a business. It's a state of mind, and sometimes you just need to do it yourself.

Well, I had to find out what was going on with the shipping, because we'd gotten a couple of emails asking for tracking numbers.

So, I jump in. I'm working on a laptop, so I don't have my dual monitors that I had (I gave them to charity when I moved to NY, they were old, worked, but wayyyyy too heavy to pack and lug, again). What I could do was split the two screens so that I could see all the info from the shopping cart, and the paypal shipping template.

Problem solved. I got 98 labels done in two hours, and we were back on schedule.

So now we're shipping about 80 boxes a day.

See, it's not just making soap. It's then cutting the loafs. Then shrink wrapping. Then labeling. Then invoicing and charging credit cards for those orders that didn't go through paypal. Then writing out gift cards to people who sent gifts.

Normally, this wouldn't be a problem, regular sized production facility and office space or not. We're organized. Or, I should say, they're organized.

But whew... this took some doing. We're almost up to date with orders, thank god. International orders are getting sent out. That was another headache... we'd never shipped international Soapier orders before. So, we had to estimate shipping overseas, and then contact each customer with the actual shipping cost. That took a lot of time.

One of the things I've tried to drill into my mom's head is the simple fact that, unless you're in a very specialized situation (perhaps as we are in right now), customers do not care that you're working 18 hour days.

They just want their product.

That's not to say that people are insensitive. As I said, I think we're in a pretty unique position, and we're so thankful for people who are being so patient with us... but when you're a business owner, customers are key, and you make them happy. You want them to stay customers.

So, working ridiculous hours is part of the business. I've pretty much been up until 2 or 3 in the morning for the past week or so, every night, trying to make things easier, while I'm 1,151.51 miles away from my family.

On a lighter note, I can't stop drinking berry smoothies.

Seriously. I just had one, and I want another. I put in frozen strawberries, fresh blueberries and raspberries, and soy milk. I can't stop drinking them. Luckily, across the street is a fresh fruit and vegetable stand. They're all over the place in NYC.

Ok, ok.

Anyway.

That's where we're at today. I looked at the addresses I'd entered in, and saw I was getting caught up... I figured I'd update this again.

Hope you're all looking forward to the weekend!

Oh, and our awesome old PR company sent out a press release for us today, for free. That was very nice of them. You can read it here, if you'd like.

Talk soon.

J