Not feeling very LOL-y today.

I know that normally Boredwalk emails are crammed with fun art, amusing GIFs, and somewhat humorous takes on random lesser holidays, celebrity birthdays, and historical events, but not this one. It's late, it's been a long day, and I'm quite tired.

Well, technically it's early; as I begin typing this, the local time is 12:08am, and Boredwalk co-founder Meredith and I just got home from the office following a pretty grueling 14+ hour day.

If you've ordered from Boredwalk recently — say, in the last 1-2 weeks — you're probably wondering where the heck your order is, which is a fair question. 

The short answer is: somewhere on our production floor, in some state of being processed.

As I've explained to some of our subscribers/customers individually over the last few days, we lost two members of our production department in May & June. At the time we didn't rush to replace them because, honestly, 2022 has been kind of a tire fire for us as far as order volume. But then SCOTUS's Roe reversal happened, and sales of our Nolite Te Bastardes Carborundorum tees unexpectedly skyrocketed (if you're a fan of the Margaret Atwood novel The Handmaid's Tale or its popular television adaptation, you get the reference). 

Then we had a shortened work week at the end of June due to Boredwalk's observance of Juneteenth. And then another one due to the Independence Day holiday last week. And we also have a pretty huge wholesale order due to ship out tomorrow to a large retailer that can't ship late, or we lose a ton of money in penalty fees.

Throw in persistent supply chain issues on top of all that, and it has created a perfect storm of crummy circumstances that has stretched our operations teams (Customer Service, Shipping, and Production) to the breaking point. 

We've all been working crazy-long hours over the last two weeks to get that big wholesale order done in time for pickup at 3pm this afternoon, but that means our retail orders — the ones placed through our website by readers like you — have (temporarily) fallen by the wayside. 

We're working hard to keep up with those retail orders while also meeting our obligations to our retail partners, but the honest truth is that we kinda suck at operations. Meredith and I are much better at designing products and writing funny things than we are at creating and optimizing systems around production, customer service, vendor management, and shipping. Marlene, our Operations Manager, has been tireless in helping make sure our company lives up to all our customers' expectations, whether they're a retail customer ordering a single shirt or a 60-store chain ordering 7000 shirts, but no one at Boredwalk really has any sort of formal training in operations, logistics, etc. — we're all just sort of making it up as we go along and hoping for the best. 

Anyway, it's now almost 1:00am, and I have to be back at the office in a few hours to continue helping the rest of the team prep these pallets of shirts and totes for pickup. If you ordered from us recently and it hasn't shipped or arrived yet, I'm sorry. We're not scammers, nor have we forgotten about you. We hope to get caught up over the next week as far as shipping those late retail orders, and will be meeting internally to try and learn from this experience so that moving forward we don't let down our customers in this way again. 

I, and the rest of the crew at Boredwalk, appreciate your patience and understanding while we get things back on track over the next several days. Some of the folks reading this are OGs who've been shopping with us since the Ex-Boyfriend days, some have been shopping with Boredwalk since we first launched on Etsy way back in 2014, and some may be reading their very first Boredwalk email right now (if that's you, I promise they're usually WAY less of a downer than this one has been). Boredwalk really only exists thanks to you and your support over the years. We appreciate the heck out of you, and are committed to learning from our missteps these last couple weeks in an effort to provide an even better experience for our customers in the future. I hope you have a wonderful weekend. Or at least a moderately OK one.

Peace, love, and apologies,

Matt (and the rest of the Boredwalk staff)