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Hand made delivery times and costs.

Hi All,

I’ve decided to give you all some insight into what goes on behind closed doors! Oooh!

Here at Sarah’s Fleeces we all try really hard to make excellent quality products and get them to you, our lovely customers, in a timely fashion.

Now if you’re used to eBaying or buying products from big high street name shops online you’re probably equally used to having your order arrive in next to no time. That’s all well and good when who you’re shopping from is having their millions of products manufactured in China for a tiny cost and selling them for a huge markup over here. But meanwhile in smaller companys like ours we hand make all your items personally for you. This reduces our waste and hence land fill, it also minimises our risk on high over heads.

What happens after I make an order?

First of all our emails are checked daily except on Saturdays and Sundays as I put my family before my business and unless there’s an emergency I do my best not to work at the weekend as even though I love my work I love my family more
When an order comes in I manually check it and then automatically process it through our system. I then select one of my wonderful ladies who sew for me to produce the order. I email them the order (to save paper) and get on with gathering all the various things they need to create your product – a pattern, fleece, thread, 2 different labels and maybe a zip. Now because we offer our products in 19 different colours and patterns and I live in a normal sized house I can’t keep a roll of each type in our house – there wouldn’t be room for us (this is where I start visualising a potential future factory…), but I do keep some of the most popular ones all the time.
Every so often someone will order something and I haven’t got enough of the right colour fleece so I have to order some more. This will take 2-3 days to get to me.
So I’ve got all the items the sewer will need and then I need to take them to them. When taking on new sewers I make sure that our paths cross naturally somehow or another. Either I see them on the school gates/at church/at the local community centre/at a social event or we drive near each other’s house in some part of our normal life’s journey’s somewhere or other. Either way we make sure that neither of us go out of our way to deliver something to each other. This keeps our fuel miles to the minimum and the time taken to do this essential part of the process. So it can take up to a week from you placing an order to the sewer getting it.
So once the sewer has got everything needed they cut out the material, pin it together, sew it and quality check it. For something small and simple like a single layered hat this may only be a 30 minute job but for something like women’s all in one pyjamas this may be a 5 hour job!
So actually the time taken to make an item is the bigger factor in an items cost. If someone is earning the minimum wage, times this by 5 and it’s easy to see how the pricing works. We pride ourselves in providing quality employment for those who might otherwise find it hard to get work. For us age, background, class or whether or not someone is able bodied or not is not an issue, their ability to be produce high quality goods in a timely and reliable fashion is really all that matters. When other people choose to do this work is entirely up to them. I have ladies who sew for 6 hours in the day time and can make the full range of our products, and others who choose to only do 2 hours an evening and only feel comfortable making the more simple, small items. Whenever we choose to sew our ethics are always family first. That’s the beauty of our company As we’re rarely making just one product at a time the time taken from a sewer getting the item to giving it back to me is on average a week.
When I pick up the products I do a quality check just to make sure they’re perfect
The products then get packaged up ready for posting;
I leave early for the afternoon school run to be able to post your parcel in the post office on the way. They get posted 2nd class recorded delivery to keep your p&p cost down but guarantee it’s delivery.
So all in all the maximum 28 day delivery time was agreed on to make sure that this minimum of 10-14 days delivery time allowed for real life events that can happen to anyone like snow, car breakdown, illness, etc.