Packing Up-Another Annual Adventure

This is one of the rows of packages. We had them stacked in my garage, all lined up like soldiers, or order by waist measurement. 

 As fun at this is for us every year, there is ALWAYS a point when we're going through invoices with confidence, but then we can't find the box to match the invoice ANYWHERE! What happens is that our Black Friday sale is so popular that people are quite literally clicking on items and purchasing them at the exact same second, and so we double-sell things.  We thought about maybe NOT listing every single thing we had, thus anticipating the probable glitches, but the issue there is that we have no possible way of knowing which sizes will be the ones that need extra.

OH, hey! Look it's my kitchen! At this point in time, I should probably be like every other woman ever and apologize for my messy house. ;)  I mean, SHAME on me for having packages everywhere! 

     However, even though crazy things occur every year, I can always either make more corsets, pull out of my current festival inventory, or alter down some of the lonely bags that happen every year (how do we orphans? I've never figured that one out!).  The thing is, when mistakes happen, and it's no one's fault, I would always rather have my company take the blame and lose the money, as opposed to the customer. I try to always think about it from my own point of view. How would I feel if I was super excited to get something at such a great price, and then the company let me know that I wouldn't get anything and would have to accept a refund? Now, to be honest, we DID have to do this last year. There were several packages that were $500 pirate coats, plus skirts and blouses. They got oversold, and I just COULD NOT BEAR to make whole brand new sets which would take a ton of time and money, losing us so much in the end. We WERE able to pull about 60-70 brand new items out of our show inventory to make up for any of the other missing packages, but I did have my limits.

Leif let me work pretty well today. However, the little guy kept getting hiccups (which make him sound like a squeak toy) and I would have to hold him and try to calm him. 

OH my!  You live and you learn. We worked for 9 solid hours just packing, and it took that whole entire time just for my assistant to print out all of the invoices (we have to be as careful as possible so as to not miss invoices or double-print!).  In the meanwhile, every single one of us got our cars snowed into my driveway (remember how my garage was being used for your packages? ;) and so we all got to grab shovels and dig ourselves out. The cruel irony is that we DID just buy a snowblower, but it was still in its package, and even if we had been able to put it together, we didn't have a way of getting out to get gas. Irony.