While we had heard many horror stories about PosteItaliane, our experience with them early on was on-par with our experiences with the US Postal Service — not exactly easy, but packages got picked up from us and delivered to our customers. Evidently, the honeymoon period is over, because we have had nothing but problems getting our orders where they need to be.

Case in point are the hundreds of orders pictured here that are all sitting finished, packaged, and ready. Many of them have been sitting there for weeks (and some months) waiting to be picked up. And if you’re curious why we haven’t simply dropped them off… our agreement with PosteItaliane doesn’t permit us to.

This has been an endless source of frustration for both us and our IMMENSELY patient customers.

Ultimately, this whole farce has forced us to fully re-evaluate our entire logistics plan (i.e. the delivery process from our shop to your door), and we’ve been working tirelessly over the past several weeks to set up a suitable alternative. We are still working out a few final kinks and the particulars may still change, but the long and the short of it is that we’re negotiating with distributors in the US, Canada, UK, Europe, Japan, and Australia.

In the short term, our plan is to send boxes of finished orders to the appropriate distributor using a non-PosteItaliane delivery service. Once delivered to the distributor, they will then ship each individual order using a more reliable local shipping service.

In the longer term, our hope is to actually keep some of our more popular items (like page packs and system kits) at each distributor’s warehouse so that when you place an order for one of those items, it doesn’t have to come all the way from Italy.

We’ve also restructured our order workflow to better communicate the progress of each order:

Processing – We have received your order, but have not yet started making it yet.

Crafting – We are in the process of crafting the items you’ve ordered.

QA (Quality Assurance) – All of your items have been crafted, and we’re giving everything a once-over (and we’re re-making anything that we don’t think is up-to-snuff) before packaging it up.

Preparing for Shipment – Your order has officially passed muster and is now getting packed and sorted. This is your last chance to make any changes to your order before it leaves our shop.

En Route to Hub – Your order is on its way to the distributor closest to you.

At Hub – Your order has been received by the distributor and is being processed to ship out to you.

Shipped – Your order has left the distributor and is on its way to you!

We’ve actually used this sort of distributor-based system before, and we are feeling pretty optimistic about this new direction. That also gives us a decent idea of what to expect in terms of likely pain points and other hurdles.  While all of this is a pretty big undertaking, in the end this is going to be better not only for us, but for our customers as well.