End of the year update

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Christmas is almost here and then one week later – bam it’s a new year.  I wanted to just share some bits and pieces with you and thought this would be a good time to do it.  So here we go:

• Tomorrow – Wed, 12/22 is the last day we are shipping out orders before Christmas.  We are spending Christmas with family and will not be shipping orders again until Tuesday 12/28.  If you want something shipped out before Christmas we need to receive the order by noon tomorrow (12/22.)  Priority Mail shipping may get it there in time particularly if you are in the Dallas area.
• I would like to thank everyone who has ever taken the time to comment or respond to me both on my blog and through email and facebook and any other media.  Getting your comments and input helps me to provide a better product for you.  Earlier this month for example I had set up some of our soaps where they could be ordered in either 4 oz. or 2 oz. sizes.  I had checked it out on the browser that I normally use and everything was fine.  However, one of my customers was having problems placing her order.  She finally got it placed but happened to mention that she had to use a different browser other than Safari.  I downloaded Safari to check it out and sure enough for some reason our inventory attributes weren’t working.  I visited Miva’s forum and discovered that the Miva version I had wasn’t “playing nice” with Safari.  They had since come out with a more recent update.  I had my Miva host update my cart and “voila” everything appears to working correctly now.  I would have never realized there was a problem and didn’t even know that particular type of cart updating was something I needed to watch for unless my customer had mentioned it.   So please, please if you have an issue; good or bad; let me know.  I am only one person wearing many hats and I definitely don’t know it all!
• Unfortunately, we are going to be downsizing our inventory somewhat.  In case we happen to hit on a favorite product or scent of yours I wanted to give you a little background behind the decision.  We are a small batch manufacturer.  That means we make our products in specific batch quantities.  It allows us to set our prices where they are.  If we had to make every item individually to order the prices would be MUCH higher.  As you know our products are all natural.  This means that after we make a batch of product we need to be selling that batch in a timely manner.  As the economy has slowed down our sales have as well.  We have some items where we simply are not selling the batch through quickly enough.  We haven’t made all of our decisions yet but we will be discontinuing a few products and some scents within products.  I wanted to take the time to explain this because inevitably some people end up disappointed when we have to discontinue items.  Believe me, we are disappointed too.  We love all of our products and hate to discontinue any but hopefully now you can understand what’s behind our actions.