My manufacturer needs to take Operations classes

I called my manufacturer last Friday, left a message, and he didn’t return my call. So today I sent him a meeting request for later in the week, asking him for a production update. He emailed back and asked if I could call him today at 2:30pm EST. This response gave me a sinking feeling. Another delay?! Could it be?!

I called him right away and he let me know that the shipment was still on track to leave this Friday, but he wanted me to send the tote bag sample to him overnight because the in-house sample was never finished. WTF? I asked him why he didn’t just call me back on Friday and tell me this then so it wouldn’t be an overnight shipment, and he said, “It wasn’t until yesterday that we started working on your production, and realized that we didn’t have a good sample to work from.”

So of course I sent him the sample. It barely squeezed into a large FedEx standard size box. I really crammed it in there– it might pop out like a jack-in-the-box when the box is opened. I’m pretty peeved right now, but at least he’s actually working on my production. That’s a giant step for this manufacturer! I am pretty sure he loses money on each job because he is extremely inefficient and he doesn’t understand the concept of bottlenecks– I wonder if he’d be open to constructive criticism once my first production wave is done.

On a more positive note, the website is moving along nicely, and I reviewed the latest beta version today. There are still quite a few kinks to work out, but at least I know my e-commerce site can go live soon.  I’ve also found a courier service, Delivery Express of Seattle, that I’ll use for my small freight delivery. I called around 10 different places and found out that only a handful of delivery places have vans or small box trucks for a delivery like mine. Delivery Express seemed to have the best value, so I’ll go with them and blog about how it turns out.

Thanks for reading!

Time to find a courier!

I’ve had a series of check-ins today, and it looks like things are still on-track for production.

1) My bags are being put into production this week, and should still be delivered on the 19th

2) My website is revised and I’ll have an in-person meeting with the developers to review it again next week 

3) The sample plastic parts I need for the purse organizer are en-route to me from the east coast and I should be able to know soon if these materials can work for my purse organizer walls

Tomorrow I’ll be calling a bunch of courier services to see who can deliver five 75-lb. fabric rolls to Tukwila for the lowest price. I’d like to get those purse organizers manufactured as soon as the plastic parts are ready. It looks like a courier might be about the same cost as sending them FedEx Ground. These rolls are definitely too heavy for me to load into a car, not to mention that I drive a teeny tiny Mini. I don’t think these will fit in my husband’s Accord, either, and I’m not one to experiment with having oversized things dangling from the trunk or the hood of a car. If you know of a good courier service in the Seattle/Kirkland/Bellevue area, let me know!

Thanks for dropping by!

I got a PO box for my business!

Sure, at first getting a PO box might not seem like a big deal, but it turned out to be more of an ordeal than I thought it would be. First of all they need 2 forms of ID, one of which is a picture ID, the other is proof of residency. Well, I only just moved 3 weeks ago, and all of the utility bills were put in my husband’s name, which is a different last name from mine. We haven’t even received a utility bill yet. I thought the most straightforward thing to do to prove my residency would be to get a new license, so I decided to go to the DMV today.

I checked the wait times at the DMV closest to me, and throughout the day the wait times were over 1 hour and 30 minutes. I thought I would just go and tough it out by waiting in line. Getting through the DMV parking lot was like a real-life Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride– there were cars driving in the wrong lanes, cars blocking the entryway to the building, and there were compact cars that took up 2 spaces. It was awful. I checked around to make sure they weren’t all Asian drivers– praying that my Asian bretheren weren’t fueling the stereotype that Asians were terrible drivers. I was relieved to see that most of these driving violations were being committed my white folks. Whew.

The info booth person at the DMV told me that my wait for getting a  new license would be 2 hours and 45 minutes, and I needed my old drivers license, another government issued photo ID like my passport, and one other document like a utility bill in my name that proved that I lived at my new place. Ugh. They needed the same info the post office needed to issue a PO Box! I decided to leave, and as I tried to pull out of my parking space, a testy, impatient driver who wanted to take my spot gave me only about 1 millimeter of room to back out. When I finally inched around his car, I saw in my rearview mirror that he was Asian. Damnit!

I re-read the PO box application again and saw that a current lease could serve as secondary proof that I lived at my address, so I thought I’d try to apply again with just my passport and my lease. When the post office worker reviewed my application, the first thing he asked for was my license. I explained to him that the address on the license was old and I was trying to get a new one, and he said he’d accept this ID and then asked for my passport. It turns out I didn’t need any proof of residency for my current place. What the #^#&*$?

Oh well, who cares. I am now the proud owner of PO Box 417 in Kirkland. My PO box has been acquired, and this will serve as my contact address on my website. Yahoo!!!