Olympic orchids perfume

Several factors have conspired to slow things down and introduce shipping delays.

First, one of our websites was hacked and down for a month, during which time I spent a huge amount of time trying to get it back up and functioning. That issue is (I hope) fixed, but I got behind on making perfume concentrates.

Second, the volume of orders has doubled following the July sale, and many of them are custom orders. The team member who made samples has left to study at the university, and we are scrambling to get the samples and custom sets produced. Until we add a new team member, we will be scrambling to get it all done.

Third, we just discovered that a supplier sent the wrong (very important!) material, and we are waiting for it to be replaced with the correct one. This means that production is pretty much on hold for the next week or so. We can ship items that were already in stock, but not ones that must be newly produced.

I have maintained the small business model of producing everything in-house rather than outsourcing. This means that you get a product made by humans, for humans – something that is increasingly rare. It also means that we may not be able to fill every order immediately. We do not use AI at any stage, not for answering the phone, not for answering emails, not for writing copy, not for producing images, not for formulating perfumes, not for anything else including living our lives. Now that automation and AI used by outside sources have introduced many errors, hacking incidents, time-consuming interactions with bots, and copious amounts of spam. I go through and do mass deletes of the spam that evades the filters, so if you have emailed me about a meaningful issue and not received a response, collateral damage when sorting may be why. Please try again. I do not respond to texts, but will respond to voicemails if they seem legitimate and the message makes sense.

Thank you for being patient as we work through all of the issues described above.

-Ellen

The cost for shipping a small package is more than the cost of a single sample, so we cannot ship single samples for free. The minimum purchase amount is currently $6.00, but shipping of a small package in the US now costs from 6.00 to almost 9.00, depending on some seemingly arbitrary USPS calculations. I may have to change the minimum purchase amount if there are further rate increases.

I’m really sorry to have to write this, but international shipping seems to be in chaos right now. Several shipments have had the address changed by the postal service while en route, some appear not to have been scanned properly for tracking, and I learned that a package addressed to Canada ended up in Puerto Rico! That address wasn’t changed – Canada was clearly still on the tracking info. The problem is not just with the USPS, which in the past was typically reliable. Some things that have been shipped to me or to others via UPS or FedEx never were delivered. Some customers have been charged excessive taxes and/or duties and refused the package, so it was sent back to us.

I blame it on excessive automation and AI systems with no human oversight. Maybe some of these glitches, whether unintentional or intentional, can be corrected, but until then, there will be no international shipping to individual customers. I know this is frustrating for everyone, but that’s the way the world is this year. We do not ship to international addresses with the state listed as “WA”, so there is no point in trying.