Greetings from Sunny Spain

Last week I was telling you about the new warehouse and updates on progress.also introduced you to some of our China suppliers. If you missed it you can read about it here.
Since then, things have moved on quite a bit.. We installed ten packing benches, started a lot of new guys who are being trained and brought up to speed right now.
The number of orders shipped per day is now more than we are receiving (at least most of the time).  It's really "All systems Go!"
I took an early morning Easyjet flight to Malaga on Saturday morning.. been visiting our Spain company who have been left a bit to their own devices during the last few months. It was really nice to catch up things, and brilliant to find the office and warehouse quite buzzing with activity. Toni and his team all looking good, the showroom is beautiful, I couldn't be more happy with their progress. Toni says his only problem is getting enough stock quick enough.. Check them out: AWArtisan.es. Meanwhile The Beast - is on the way.. 

Let me explain about the production department. As you know we make bath bombs, artisan soaps, aromatherapy products and home fragrance stuff. After the fire we had to remake the production from scratch. Dushan and Neil the production managers and their team worked round the clock and rooted out the equipment we need and amazingly made it all happen. Absolute AW hero's!  We were forced to work from about 15 thousand square feet in Units 1,2,3 at Parkwood Business Park with lower floor of unit 3 used for production. If you have following the story you will know how we managed to move the distribution to Europa way. Our plan is to use all three units for production, effectively increasing capacity threefold. 

So we have been making SLS free soaps using what is called "a plodder" - what it does basically is mince up the soap noodles with the aromatic additions and then extrude the soap through a dye. Our old machine had served us well for many years, and we had hoped it might have survived the fire, but even that solid bit of kit was destroyed. We began to look for a new machine, they make them in Korea, India and China.. but in the age of corona, and worldwide high demand for soap all the manufacturers where quoting six months lead times.  So we turned to the secondhand market.. after much casting around, one of our contacts knew someone who knew someone in France that had a machine to sell. The only thing is this machine is big, it can produce 10 times what we used to produce a day.
A charming French guy, with impeccable English gave us a whatsapp tour of the machine, he assured us it will do the job and he has a UK contact who can commission it for us. The price wasn't negotiable, €30K - 40% deposit, after a refurb the balance on collection. We collected this week. The Beast from France is on the way.. it is coming from Île de Ré  an island close to La Rochelle. He kindly sent pictures of it been loaded. 

So that's quite exciting we expect to receive it next week.
Last week I was also telling you about the Nepal container that finally arrived. It was a year ago Tomas and I was in Kathmandu placing those orders. The airport closed due to covid and the lockdown there delayed production also. Eventually our agent there found away to get the goods out over land in a container to Kolkata port in India. Actually two containers, one shipped to our Slovakia warehouse and one to UK. 
I thought you might like to meet some of the delightful suppliers from Nepal..