Our New Quickship & Build-To-Order Strategy

I'm sure that you noticed that we offer a lot of design variety in our products.  In fact, we now offer over 35,000 different variations... Yes, I know that is way, way too many :)

It is just that nice customers like you kept asking us for new and different things and we had a hard time saying no.  Somebody wanted Cocobolo because they had a guitar that they wanted to match.  Someone else wanted to match the inlay on their Taylor.  All good requests.  I mean how can I say no to that logic?  So, instead we kept saying YES!  

But that philosophy created some operational problems for us. Because everyday we seem to be building hundreds of different products, and each one is a freaking snowflake.  For whatever reason, if given the choice you all choose different things.  This gives us little manufacturing economies of scale and all of sudden it was taking us a week to build your capo.

So here is my solution to making this process work better for all of us.  First, we will continue to offer crazy, cool combinations and yes we will keep adding more and more guitars to our phone case offerings and keep adding new woods and shells to our capos offerings.  HOWEVER, we have now added a QUICKSHIP Collection to each of our product categories.  These products are built in advance and ready to ship.  There are some amazing products in these collections and most of you will find exactly what you are looking for AND satisfy your need for instant gratification.  Because these products will also come with a commitment that we will SHIP THE SAME DAY if you order by 1pm.  If you want something that isn't built, we will still build that snowflake product for you with love, but it will take 3-5 days to build it.  

By adding these new QUICKSHIP Collections I hope to accomplish a two things: 

1)  Ensure that you if you want to get something FAST that you can get it and that you have some great choices to choose from!

2)  By incentivizing more customers to choose QUICKSHIP products, this will take pressure off our our Build-to-Order process and our turn-around-times for our Build-To-Order products will improve drastically.

UPDATE:  It has only been a few days since I rolled this out, but I can tell you already that this strategy is working.  We now have about 50% of our orders coming in as QUICKSHIP Orders and our turn around times for BTO are plummeting!