Good Bye Italy

I've finally cracked! I've had it up to here (I'm holding my hand up above my head!) The Italian Postal Service are Thieves and due to their lack of ability to deliver my packages I have decided to stop sending to Italy.
Apologies to any existing customers, but only 1 in 3 packages gets to it's recipient in Italy. The usual procedure is that I send the items, I get an angry email 2 weeks later, then resend the items and then get a paypal dispute, which of course I lose as it is started as an item not received case. So all in all I lose 2 x the items ordered then the money initially paid.
This post is a rant but I've not posted for a while anyway.

Update: After the red mist cleared I did indeed continue shipping to Italy. Fortunately we have a new agreement with Royal Mail and we should be receiving compensation for every missing parcel.

Aston Martin

I broke a rule today, I usually go by no collections. I work from home and don't want to have people coming and going. At lunch time today I received a call from a very desperate sounding man, needing 90 Red LEDs today as their regular supplier had let them down. So with a man in need, I broke the rule.
He drove a hour to pick the LEDs up and only stopped for a short chat, but in this time he told me where the LEDs would end up, apparently they'd be in Geneva within 48 hours, taking pride of place in the rear lights of the Aston Martin Lagonda at the Geneva Motor show.
I think that's rather cool.

Norway

To everyone in Norway,
Please accept my sincerest apologies. It would seem in my haste to construct an excellent website to service the world's growing need for high quality, low cost LEDs - that resulted in www.phenoptix.co.uk - I forgot to add Norway to my list of countries that I ship to.
Unlike South Park, I do not blame Canada for this oversight, I blame Kenya.
A further apology for unleashing this song on any unsuspecting readers.

This oversight has been rectified. Norway I welcome you to phenoptix.

Regards,

Ben Gray

Snow Problem?

Well you'd think that the UK was up to it's eyeballs in snow. In the East Midlands the reality was a couple of inches of snow, which looked very pretty and wasn't too much trouble to walk or drive in.
Since I work from home a snow day wouldn't really be an option even if there were 6 feet of snow but it would seem, judging by how many customers are still waiting for products sent last week, most of Royal Mail took those days off. A fair few other people took the day off too, 1 in 5 in the UK, 20% of the country's workforce. Amazing.
Hopefully this week everyone will be back to getting their goods next day.
Although all said I like snow, and my puppy, Lilly, likes it too.

Cost Cutting

With my supplier's prices up 25-30% on this summer due to the falling value of the pound I've had to find as many ways to economise as possible to keep prices competitive. I've not yet put up any prices and if the pound starts to recover I shouldn't have to.
One of the first things I've cut down on is packaging. Any customers reading will have noticed the size of packaging has shrunk. I typically send small numbers of SMDs in envelopes now. My rational is that they're packaged in a protective plastic casing anyway and padded between the invoice and envelope. It then means I can send them as a letter rather than a large letter saving 16p which is a massive amount on small value purchases. Otherwise we just use smaller Jiffy bags.
Another thing is we're using less colour in our printing, colour printing just costs too much in these hard times.
Other cost cutting measures are reusing tea bags, bathing less and of course using energy efficient, long lifetime, reasonably priced LEDs from my own stocks on eBay and phenoptix.co.uk

Customer Service

I messed up a few times this week I have to admit, I don't mind compensating, even over compensating when I mess up. I even compensate when the postal service mess up.

5 years on...

So 5 years ago I opened this account for blogging. Seems I didn't get around to it!
Well in the last 5 years a lot has changed, but writing about it all would no doubt take a fair bit of time. So lets concentrate on the now.
The part time pocket money project started at Exeter University is now a full time business. After some neglect our ebay store is back fighting fit and the feedback is clocking up nicely. The website is the next project. Our prices need a little adjustment and we've got loads of new stuff to list.
It's a very exciting time for me, a nervous one too considering the state of the world economy, but I'm expecting big things from phenoptix in 2009.