Real Talk

Happy Civic Holiday, everyone!

Hope y'all enjoyed your long weekends. I wanted to give a little update about… all kinds of things.

As long-time customers know, we typically run pre-orders a few times a year for our large incoming shipments.

There are sooo many good Chinese children's books out there, and we only have so much space. Given long lag times with ocean freight, it helps IMMENSELY to know which ones y'all want before we organize a boat shipment over.

We really REALLY appreciate your patience in all our pre-orders so far! 🥺

As restrictions ease up these days, things may start to feel like it's "returning to normal". But ocean freight—unfortunately—have *not*.

In fact, talking to fellow business owners, they’re also experiencing what I'm seeing: higher prices, container/space shortages, even longer delays than earlier in the pandemic.

I will be totally transparent: our outstanding pre-order is currently *still* waiting to board 😭 It's been packed and ready to go for a WHILE now. This pre-order is even the *fastest* one I've turned around into an order with our suppliers too. But, here we are… waiting to get on a ship.

We still think the pre-order will arrive end of September (our "conservative" estimate when we opened the pre-order). I'm monitoring that closely and will keep y'all posted.

That actually isn't even what this post is about though lol.

Given what I'm seeing with this past pre-order, I'm struggling to decide what I want to do with our next shipment from Hong Kong.

Normally, I would've opened pre-orders by now. But, I can't bring myself to do it.

As a small business owner, it’s a LOT of pressure to have customers prepay for something, and then not have control over when I can deliver.

Many of our customers are super sweet and understanding about delays (💕). But, there are always those who are new to us (hi 👋), who aren't familiar with us, and who will inevitably and understandably be upset by delays.

Soo… after much deliberation, I’m going to try something a little different... I'm going to try to organize a shipment *without* a pre-order 😱😱😱

Not gunna lie, it's a liiiiiittle scary.
And risky.
Especially for our tiny little business.

But I feel better about taking on this risk than having to stress about "owing" customers indefinitely.

To help mitigate *some* of this risk, if there's something you want, please let us know via waitlist!!

Waitlisting is obviously not a firm commitment like pre-orders are, so we kindly ask that you waitlist only if you're fairly serious about purchasing.

Don’t worry, we're not ordering *solely* based on waitlist numbers, but it *does* helps us gauge relative demand 💕

And with that, here's what-would-have-been-preorder-highlights... for your browsing and waitlisting pleasure lol (Please complete your waitlisting in the next few days 🙏🏻)

Thank you so much for supporting this little small business ♥️ We appreciate you!