Alrighty Folks.... Happy Turkey Day!

This is the first time in a couple of years that Jeff and I are in the States for Thanksgiving. The last 2 years we've been in Amsterdam working and playing. This year, we'll just be working. Don't feel too badly for us, though, I managed to earn enough Turkey points to get a "free" bird and I'll be cooking Mama's famous cornbread dressin' and cauliflower salad and giblet gravy. Nothing better than Thanksgiving leftovers...

Anyway, on Friday we'll be putting the Cannabis Cup and Hank III posters up in our store. What about the Dragon prints? I still need to make sure I have everybody covered from the initial release and if there are some left to go in, I'll put those up, too. Please, if you already ordered one or 2, let the folks who didn't get one on the first release have a chance at these.

Most of the tubes from the last release and orders taken after have shipped. I still have just a small number that still need to ship for various reasons, so if you have not received a notice from the USPS with a Delivery Confirmation number yet, yours may be among those few.

Jeff and I are working on a new web site and store upgrade. We have taken a lot of the suggestions from our customers to heart and are looking for solutions to some of the not-so-user-friendly aspects of the current site. Also, the blog will become part of the main site and all of our updates will be done there.

That's all for now! Don't get too stuffed on Thursday - save some room for some posters! Happy Thanksgiving, guys and gals!

Dragon Print and 11.01.07 Release Updatery

Well, as most of you can imagine, the order monkey (me) is just a little overwhelmed with orders right now. All 120 copies of the "Here There Be Dragons" print sold out on the release day and in addition to those orders, we took quite a few other orders for items I just returned to the web store after inventory. Some of you are writing to inquire about the Dragon prints that we still have... yes, there are a small number still available, but I won't be able to tell ya exactly how many until Jeff has finished with them. Please hang tight and as soon as I know the number I'll pass along the info on how they can be purchased.

Meanwhile, if you already have an order pending please be patient. I'll contact each person as I get through the process of getting them into Quickbooks. I plan to take it slow and easy in order to minimize any shipping mistakes that I might make if I tried to hurry the process. Oh, and it's just me, folks. I'll be answering all your emails, invoicing all orders, packing all tubes, creating all shipping labels and then driving 'em to the Post Office, so be patient and you will soon have a tube full of DCS love headed your way.

In studio news, artist Dave Huckins will be here on Monday and Tuesday watching the wheels turn at DCS. I'll tell him y'all said "Hello."

Shipping Changes at Drowning Creek

We have several things to mention in regards to our shipping and fulfillment, so bear with me while I go through as much as I can here. This post will be linked from our FAQ page on the main site for easy back-reference.

As everyone probably knows, the USPS increased rates back in mid May. At first we throught that we would not be affected, but we soon realised that shipping costs being charged for some locations were not covering actual costs. Due to this, we very quietly raised our standard shipping by $.55 per base rate from $8.20 to $8.75. This price includes insurance and the cost of the tube and packaging materials. We'll further review our shipping and possibly adding a dynamic calculator to our store so that the costs are more accurate by distance, but until then we still reserve the right to add to the shipping cost quoted on your input order as necessary. We do not do this very often.

The international shipping calculator is currently not working properly on our web store. We're not sure why, but we'll try to get it fixed asap. If you are an international customer and you input an order and the shipping comes to less than us$5, we hope that you will realize that is likely a mistake. International shipping went up considerably to some locations, often costing nearly as much as the posters themselves. When I input these orders, I calculate postage using the USPS web site's International Postal Calculator using the 30529 zip code to whatever country the order is shipping. You may do the same on your end if you'd like a better idea of the shipping before placing an order. Most single poster tubes weigh approximately 12-15 ounces.

Now for the "big" announcement:

For a little over the last year we've been blessed to have Mr. Rick Ramirez and Temple Ball Gallery on board with Drowning Creek acting as our fulfillment center. We're sad to announce that this will no longer be the case. Due to Rick's path taking him in the direction of other pursuits, we wil, at least for the interim, be bringing the shipping back in house. Jeff and I wish Rick all the best and hope his journey will be blessed with much success. Thank you, Rick, for all the hard work and sweat you poured into shipping all those tubes!!! We love you!

Meanwhile, we expect there to be only minor transitional hurdles, so hopefully the only thing that will be noticably different will be the postmark on your packages!

Updatery, Patience and Contacting DCS

Howdy folks!

Well, we're on schedule to put new posters in the web store tomorrow, so here's your head's up on that.... the Jam in the Dam, Umphrey's McGee and PGroove St. Paddy's Day posters will be new in the store tomorrow some time after lunch. I've also been trying to get some One-of-a-Kind items up in that section but I'm not sure if that will happen before tomorrow. I'll try...

Which brings me to the part of the title of this blog post - Patience and Contacting DCS.

For the last several months Jeff and I have been trying to figure ouut how to cut our hours back here at the shop. We've been working from about 9am until abuot midnight pretty regularly for the last several years. Why? Because during the day we have so many interuptions and distractions, we actually don't get any work done until after the rest of the sane world goes home to eat dinner and plop their booties in the easy chair to watch the evening news. We would very much like to get our work done during normal work hours, too, so we can have time for personal art projects and to work on our garden.

In light of that, we've been trying to streamline the order process, the design process and our print schedule. It takes time to transition. It also takes time to work in the web store trying to fix the listings there and add new product. We're also trying to redesign and completely upgrade the software for our web site. Mistakes are easily made when we have to stop to answer the phone or get pulled away to do something else. And we get pulled away a LOT.

How can you guys help? Well, for one thing, please be patient with us on orders. We take a little longer than we used to getting orders processed and shipped, but we're taking more orders than we did back when we shipped the same or next day we received an order. We know you're anxious to get the prints you've ordered, but give us a couple of weeks before you start getting worried. We're also trying to make sure shipping notices are sent when your shipping label is printed so you'll know what date it shipped and have the Delivery Confirmation number.

The time we need to work on these things will hopefully benefit everyone. The ordering process should be easier and less quirky and the web site should be easier to navigate. We managed to get the coding for Paypal payments added to the site yesterday in time for the release tomorrow. I'm not promising perfection, but it should help speed up the ordering process since I won't have to send out Pay Requests and wait for those to be paid until I send the invoice to Rick to be shipped.

For those of you who don't know, let me explain the ordering process:

When an order is placed, it comes to me encrypted. I then decrypt the order and copy and paste the info into Quickbooks where I manually process credit card payments. Credit card payments do not go through when your order is placed, so if you accidentally send 2 identical orders, you will not be charged automatically for both. We set up our store that way to prevent card fraud and having to void and refund payments on duplicate orders. This is why you do not get the Quickbooks invoice right away when your order is placed.

After the order is input and paid, I email a copy of it to the customer and to Rick Ramirez at Temple Ball Gallery in North Carolina where the orders are then shipped out to locations all over the world. Like Jeff and myself, Rick also has a multitude of irons in the fire. Sometimes it takes him a week or so to get orders shipped, especially when we do a release and take a lot of orders at once. Rick is just about the only person in the world I would trust to ship all of our orders, partly because i know he takes his time to assure that your posters are packaged right to arrive at their final destinations in mint condition.

I know some folks like to call to check on orders, but we took the studio phone number off the web site. For concerns about the order itself, please send an email with your order# (it should be something like FD03545) and your questions to me at the sales-at-drowningcreek-dot-com address. That gives me a chance to look into it if there is a problem instead of trying to figure it our while I have you on the phone. I usually write back very quickly on inquiries regarding orders. If you have a question about shipping dates, contact Rick-at-templeball-dot-com.

We're headed in great directions, folks, just be patient with us while we get further on down the road.......

Love and Rockets,
Judy