Black Friday/Cyber Monday & Christmas 2020

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Order volumes are always in flux. They change with the seasons, whether you’re a high street retailer, online clothing brand, or a print-on-demand supplier, and November through to January is traditionally Inkthreadable’s busiest time of year.

And it makes sense. These two months cover Black Friday/Cyber Monday and Christmas, two of the biggest commercial events for your marketing calendar. As you can imagine sales during these months skyrocket, and in recent years Inkthreadable has had challenges meeting the service levels our customers expected. 

This year we’re doing things a different way.

You’re our focus

And we really mean it. We’ve taken steps to pour our focus and full production capacity into the products, designs, and customers that have been with Inkthreadable since before Q4 2020.

We’ve paused a number of services to make sure the focus stays on you: 

  • New account registration
    Customers that wish to register a new account now join a waiting list. If we’re confident we have the capacity to fulfil orders for any new customers on specific product types we’ll approve them at our discretion, and if not no new accounts will be registered until January 2021.
  • Sample orders
    Sample codes will be paused from 2nd November 2020 until January 2021. We want customers to focus on their existing designs, and marketing for those designs, and in this way we can make sure our production capacity is focussed on orders to fulfil product sales rather than testing the water with new designs.
  • Digitising for new embroidery designs
    Digitising will be paused from 2nd November 2020 until January 2021, for the same reasons as for the sample codes. We want to give full focus to the products already on sale rather than those dipping their toes in the pool with something new.

We’re holding more stock than ever

Inkthreadable has always held stock of various SKUs, and we’ve recently developed this stock into a new Core Product range.

Our core range consists of the products which sell in higher volumes, and we hold them in stock in-house to maintain control over the supply chain and provide faster fulfilment times. Whilst a product being held in-stock doesn’t guarantee a quicker lead time, on average our core products do ship quicker — being held in stock in-house is a massive bonus.

If you make the switch to these products your orders will be far less likely to be delayed by stock issues. We’ve forecasted order volumes to prepare core stock in advance of Black Friday/Cyber Monday and Christmas 2020.

Beyond core stock, we’re holding far more single SKUs in stock than ever before. At any one time we have over ten thousand single products in stock in our warehouse, curated by a new intelligent stock management system which analyses sales data and forecasts stock requirements for the coming months.

This system means we’re now more likely to be holding a particular non-core SKU in stock when it’s needed.

More staff, more shifts

As of last week, Inkthreadable’s warehousing and production departments are operational 7 days a week. This is to offset increased order volume rather than reducing lead times, though you may see your orders ship more quickly as a result.

From early November we’ll have a second shift working in the warehousing and production departments 7 days a week, effectively doubling our production capacity. And as above, this is designed to offset the increase in order volume rather than reduce fulfilment times, but again you may see your orders ship more quickly as a result.

We're working insanely hard in preparation for the coming months. If you have any questions about what we're up to you're always welcome to reach out to our support team at support@inkthreadable.co.uk.

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