Greetings from AW new HQ at Europa Way Sheffield.

Last week I was telling you about our first days at the new warehouse, and how it looks from the eagle's view office I'm using. If you missed it you can check it out here.

Since then the pace has been full on relentless, the task at hand is biblical - it's massive - it's virtually Christmas, on top of a major move on top of a huge backlog of deliveries coming in.
The warehouse guys have been working mad-crazy-hours for days on end. We started the week 1500 orders behind, and despite best efforts we are ending it still 1300 behind. Quite simply as many orders come as we can ship out.
Some of the guys have worked every day including Saturday and Sunday for the last 14 days.. and 12 hour days. They are looking ragged and blurry eyed.. poor old Jacob who books orders and sticks despatch labels on your parcels looks at me through shrunken eyes, how are you doing mate? - I ask.. he shrugs and says we have to just do it. You are not working this weekend Jacob, I tell him, get some rest.
I realise if you are waiting for your order, letting poor old Jacob recover is not much comfort to you. You just want your delivery and quite right, so this weekend we still have an emergency shift..
Next week we will have more packing benches, more order pickers and more of the products will be booked into locations.. meaning capacity will increase.. please bear with us as we get through this..  
Thank you for your support .

Meanwhile this strange life goes on. News of Donald Trump and his wife getting the "China virus" as he likes to call it seems in retrospect an obvious outcome.  This stoking of China hatred is terrible and as bad as Hitler stoking hatred of Jews and Polish people.  

How the most practical down-to-earth decent people on earth (yes I'm talking about you Germans) could fall for this brain manipulation and be pulled into an evil war now seems unbelievable. But the more we learn about behavioural science the more we learn that human brains can be pretty easy to control. 
All this anti-China retric right now is worrying, regular readers will know that my wife is Chinese and works for AW as our China agent. I haven't seen her since the 15th January - when she left Europe to go home for Chinese New Year.. and we know what happened since then. One lady wrote to me asking why we still buy from China? Given all the human rights abuses going on in that country, how could we support such a country. I have a long and a short answer to that.. if you want to read the long version, I have put up a page here: Trading with China.  But the short simple answer is that the CCP - The Chinese Communist Party, run China, they are a subset of the Chinese people and are the ones who should be held accountable for human rights violations. Not.. I would argue the lady who makes our reed diffuser flowers, or the bright young guy who designs and makes our atomisers, or the family that produce soap flowers.  At AW we have always been pleased to deal with the small family business, and these people we can trust to be good to their staff to set high standards.. it's not their fault, heavens there is no democracy there so they can't even vote the CCP out of business. So that's why we still want to support our Chinese artisans.

Regular readers will remember when Tomas and I was in Nepal.. it seems like years ago. We ordered lots of things from three new suppliers.. stock from Nepal generally has to come by air since it is a land-locked country. But with coronavirus, hitting just as our orders were ready to ship - the airport closed. Stock was stranded there for months. In one way it was a blessing, because if it had come on time it could have been lost in the fire. In the end we sent it by truck, down the mountains, across India and it sailed from Kolkata port, finally arriving recently. Hemp bags, amazing.. beautiful brass and copper bracelets.. see below, I'm so excited to see it. If it sells well we will be happy to re-order to support the artisan families of Nepal.
See below.

Take care - stay safe.
More news next week.

David

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