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COVID-19 and your Club Rattan Update

27 May 2020

It has been a challenging couple of months, keeping our company running smoothly around the COVID-19 outbreak. How little did we know that our garden furniture would be so in demand over lock-down!

We are not a big company, so with all office staff working from home and the warehouse being run by skeleton staff to ensure social distancing, we can honestly say that we are working hard for you guys.

Second Warehouse

You asked for more stock, so we took on a second warehouse which opened last week. We can now run two teams safely and process more orders.

For your deliveries, we are relying on a network of over a hundred local delivery depots. They employ thousands of warehouse staff and delivery drivers all over the country. They are working hard to get your order delivered to you safely on the arranged date. Unfortunately, sometimes things work out differently. We can only apologise: these are unprecedented times. 

More Staff

We also needed more help with answering the hundreds of calls, emails and social media messages that are coming in daily, so we interviewed over Zoom and hired the lovely Mark.

Suspending our Phone Lines

We are still overwhelmed with calls though, so we made the difficult decision to temporarily suspend our phone lines. This frees up our team to prioritise the messages, help with customer service issues and answer your questions.

Our work hours are Monday to Friday from 9am to 5pm. Given the current circumstances, our response times may be longer than usual, so please bear with us.

Information, Information, Information

We try to answer all your questions on our Website and Social Media. Please have a look at our Product Descriptions, Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ), Delivery Information, Blogs and Reviews.

If you follow us on Social Media, we will update you on the latest stock and we post lots of customer pictures too.

How can you sell out in under a minute?

The demand for our garden furniture is unprecedented and similar to a company 20 times our size. Today we received 39 garden sets in our warehouse and there were over 800 people on our website with over 600 active carts!

After selling out so quickly, we get totally overwhelmed with calls and messages. Some customers think it's a scam, some are angry, others want to make sure there wasn't an error and some are happy that they managed to place an order.

It takes almost 6 weeks between placing an order with our factory and having the stock arrive in our warehouse. We don't have the infrastructure to sell more than we do now: around 10 containers a week, depending on the models around 450 garden sets a week.

Why are you not taking pre-orders?

Basically, we wouldn't know when to stop taking orders on stock coming in... Take today as an example: if we have 78 Harmony Sets with the Rising Table coming in a week and we would have decided today to take pre-orders, we would have sold every set for 10 weeks. That means that the last customer would get their new garden set mid August. That doesn't sound like the right thing to do.

We can decide to only sell one month into the stock coming in. This would still mean that we will be out of stock. "When will more stock be coming in?", we can hear you ask. "Can we reserve a set?" And, we would be in the same position as today: sold out, but then with customers having to wait a month for their garden set.

Conclusion

COVID-19 had our holidays cancelled, that sunny afternoon in the pub garden taken away from us and we are left at home. So we finally make our home, our garden, that place it always should have been: a place to enjoy, a space that gets used, a place to relax and make memories. Hopefully soon a place to entertain. We're sorry that we are Sold Out.

Please stay safe,

Team Club Rattan

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