Supply Chain

Big Bad Brad has been helping us fulfill our Flag Kit and Bug Zapper orders over the past two months before he starts Varsity in February. Today he's been extremey busy!

Would be nice to say that these are the kind of volumes we do on a daily basis, but the truth is, our new stock arrived yesterday and we are a little behind on our orders. To complete an order, each zapper is tested (we prefer finger testing, but not everyone can handle this), boxed, strapped and then finally 'waybilled'. All in a days work for BBB.

(In the background you can see our new 19" LCD flat screen that we picked up today.)

We had a successful meeting with a new potential flag supplier yesterday. We currently buy flags from 3 other local suppliers. Some are cheaper than others, but we have to shop around because the cheaper guys don't stock all of the 200+ country flags (in 2 different sizes each).

The company we met yesterday seemed to be the first to "get" what we are trying to do - be an online retailer for their manufacturing capabilities. All the others give us a miserly 10% discount, which we means we have to be the most expensive in the industry in order to survive. These guys understand that we're not competitors, but a complimentary business. Even though they also sell directly to the public they suggested linking from their own website to our's, crediting us as a source for buying flags online. They understand that marketing is usually the hard bit in business, so if they can get us to do it for them it's worth giving a healthy discount.

It was a good meeting in amongst a difficult day of dealing with customer complaints (see Shane's previous post). Selling physical stuff seems a lot harder than our experiences of making websites for clients.