Stargazer Sweater Preorder - Final Post
Stargazer Sweater Preorder - Final Post
Hey all you stargazers!
This is an announcement that we’ve been waiting to make for a long time now and are so excited to finally be here. We’ve been loving all of the amazing outfits you’ve been sharing with us on Instagram and Twitter and are excited to see even more once the bulk of orders have been delivered.
If you haven't received your tracking update yet please check:
- your junk folder
- all of your email accounts
- your text messages in case you opted in for SMS updates
- your order status page (you can access this from your profile by clicking "Account")
If you still can't find the update feel free to contact us using the yellow Help button at the bottom of the screen or email hello@carmico.ca.
This post marks the end of fulfillment for the preorders which is only the best kind of news. We did want to cover a few things in this post as a sort of post-mortem for the preorder and the grueling process we had to go through in order to make sure everything resolved as expected. Despite the intense challenges we faced, we thought it best for you to know what happened, how it was solved, and that you’re in good hands with Carmico.
Pre-orders are a tricky thing that we have talked about briefly in a previous blog post. The choice to launch a preorder or do an in-stock launch is always a tough decision to make when we want to release cool new products. On the one hand, preorders assure everybody can secure the product and we don’t have to worry about buying too much. On the other hand, we bear the risk and responsibility of things going wrong at every step of the supply chain. And there are a lot of steps!
When we launched the preorder in December, warehouse operations were managed exclusively by Selina, Aidan, and Brandur. Brandur left in March to travel Europe before returning to school this fall semester. This actually worked out for us because we were planning to move our operations to a fulfillment center anyways. With just Selina and Aidan remaining to receive all 108, 50lb boxes of Stargazer sweaters, the task required more space than we could have comfortably fit in our basement studio (and would have required a lot of heavy lifting up and down a flight of stairs.) Five and a half tonnes of starry sweaters are no joke.
Under normal circumstances, the migration wouldn’t have caused any issues. We were initially intending to fulfill orders as usual from our studio in Kitchener. At the time of the preorder, SKUs were missed or misplaced but it didn’t matter to us because we never used SKUs to pick orders. When we moved to the fulfillment center, SKUs became the most important piece of information on an order other than the shipping information.
We took action to correct any errors, raised concerns about the SKU issue before we started fulfillment, and worked with the fulfillment team to update the orders in their system. Everything was accounted for and the updated orders were re-imported into their system with all the necessary changes. Or so we thought…
There was an unlogged error during the import that prevented the updates. The team began fulfilling orders under the impression that all orders were now correct.
Knowing that there was an issue ahead of fulfillment gave us a level of awareness (and maybe paranoia) that something else could go wrong. We monitored the process until we noticed something was very wrong. The system showed we were out of blue sweaters despite ordering extras.
We stopped all fulfillment immediately and met with the team to explain how we knew orders were incorrect and to work on a strategy to fix all of the cascading issues that surfaced as a result.
We spent little more than a week of extremely long days correcting all of the issues. We spent hours manually adjusting and entering values into our back-end systems for hundreds of orders. It took days and sleepless nights to ensure everything went out as accurately as possible. The fulfillment team worked long hours on the weekend to make up for lost time and we can’t thank them enough.
For those that received tracking numbers but didn’t see updates for days, we requested that the fulfillment team not ship any orders until all orders were accounted for. Holding all of the packages until the very end allowed us to compare our remaining stock to the stock we expected to have.
This was a hard sell to the fulfillment team because we were congesting their warehouse. They graciously accepted our request and thankfully everything worked out.
The gravity of this error may be hard to understand for everyone who has not been a part of the process. This is the kind of error that can sink a business; that’s not an exaggeration. Two-thirds of our orders almost went out wrong, either to the wrong address or to incomplete addresses, or with the wrong items. Our dedication to our customer experience and love for Carmico is the only reason this didn't slip through the cracks.
Transparency is a core belief of ours here at Carmico. We’re sharing this with you now because we believe sharing earlier—with yet to be resolved issues—would have caused confusion and anxiety for all of the backers. We’re not perfect but we do our best to make sure all of our customers feel valued and respected; part of that respect is reflected in the way we address and communicate about issues.
We know how hard it's been for all of you who have been excited for the sweaters especially when we expected to start fulfilment in April. We thank you from the bottom of our hearts for being patient and understanding through this whole process and for being such a wonderful community. We really couldn't do it without you.
