2025 Delays & Updates Explained
Hello and welcome back to the RR Blog! I want to start with a sincere thank you to all of our supporters, and a big welcome to all of the new customers as RR continues to grow! June has been the largest sales month in history so far even with our delays and rocky start to the year.. Lets jump right into it:
January - March: I, Quinton (Owner) decided to move cities - back home sweet home.
RR moved to Carleton Place, Ontario - which is within 30 minutes of most of my family. This is great for the long term as RR expands into more of a family operation while we grow, but moving cities, prepping & selling the old house, searching for a new house & shop, as well as an unfortunate car accident which kept me away from work for a few weeks meant production was slowed severely. I set up a quick temporary shop in the new city but this meant RR was a one man operation with many things outside of the business requiring my time & attention. I kept production flowing as much as possible, but it was unfortunately much less than the norm - during the same time, order volume still continued to naturally increase.
March - April: Moving into the new shop was fairly smooth, but it was delayed until the end of March rather than the start of March as originally planned. Set up took a few weeks and we're still moving things around to this day. We're also setting up new methods to streamline the workflow, and adding to the team to ramp up production. But there was (and still is) a long list of orders to catch up on..
We could speed through and batch process orders as fast as possible but the quality would suffer as a result. So, we've decided to prioritize quality & craftsmanship over speed, we'd rather it takes a couple extra weeks for your order to arrive with product quality that'll blow you away, instead of rushing orders out the door with simple mediocre work.
As of this week we had one of our largest shipping weeks ever, and we've organized all of the delayed orders to be finally shipped out by the end of the month if everything goes to plan.
For all of the customers affected by the delays at the beginning of the year: We sent out coupon codes for future orders - held a draw with a $150 giveaway (Winner RR1326 Henry) - and have refunded customers who couldn't wait. We fully understand waiting is not something everyone is okay with regardless of the boutique quality & individually hand finished nature of our products.
Present Day: As mentioned above we're finally catching up on all of the delays, orders keep consistently growing month over month (even though we've paused all current marketing) and the early 2025 plans are now starting to be put into motion!
• The new Burst Collection has been been unveiled for Pre-Order (shipping starting around September)
• I'm now training new help
• We've decided to do another run of the Limited Vintage Celluloid Tort Guards
• And last but not least, we have a new line of Vintage Replica Hardware in the works!
RR is booming, but please keep in mind - As big as it may seem from an outside perspective, this is still a very small boutique operation in the first stages of it's growth. So, for all of the new and existing customers, be advised that we don't yet have the resources to operate in the same ways as larger companies do.
For example, Customer Service and messaging could be a full time job in itself, we've tried to automate the replies as much as we can, and recently started directing customers to contact via phone call to get urgent questions answered as quick as possible.
We've also just set up a new email account (contactrealisticrelics@gmail.com) specifically for customer contact so it can be monitored/organized much easier than our main email which has many other incoming messages unrelated to customer contact.
The current goal is to continue improving and implementing new systems throughout the year so we can operate more like a larger retail operation even with a small team. This is why I say RR is "Boutique Retail" - We offer a retail style service but we do very boutique style production as our products are all individually made to order.
Thank you again for your support and patience, we hope this update can provide some insight into the year so far, and what's to come!
All the best,
-Q