Solving the Shipping Problem

Yay!

It took a wee while but eventually our shipper, DHL, solved the case of the missing Nutshells.

If you follow here you will know we have a shipment posted early December that 'vanished' into the black hole of the global postal services.

Even though we now ship every product with a tracking code, over a dozen products mysteriously took time out someplace and went to ground.

Because it was the silly season (aka Christmas), the mails get over busy and trying to locate anything that does not want to be located becomes a bit like trying to find a needle in a haystack...or in a more biblical term, harder than threading a fat man through the eye of aforesaid needle.

However all has now been sorted; the errant products have made themselves known once again to the system and the blockage has been cleared. Our customers, who are so long suffering it is remarkable we have not yet been tarred and feathered and run of out of town on a rail are 'finally' getting their orders...more than a month after they were dispatched from us here in New Zealand.

If there are lessons to be learnt here it is that no one should ever voluntarily become the testing lab for a new service. It appears that the service we have chosen is a comparatively new one to New Zealand and, possibly because we have been in the business of global trading for so long, we unwittingly became the 'test platform'.

It is as yet unknown if we can get compensation from DHL; as a global shipper it is likely we are no more than a flyspeck on the lower corner of their windscreen. Apparently over the Christmas season DHL was shipping 50 tonnes of mail, every day, across the pond that is the Atlantic, from their central hub in Europe to the USPS postal service at JFK International airport in New York. And it seems that it is there the mystery mysteriously deepened.

As they (apparently) say...all's well that ends.

I surely do hope that is true.

XXX

The Perils of Shipping worldwide

For many of our customers shipping is a 'no brainer'. Something you never think about.
You order a product. It arrives. That is the end of it.

But when, like us, you are shipping from the other side of the planet, delivery can be a difficult thing.

Not only do we have to put up with the vagaries of the weather, which can delay a flight from here to there and add to the time it take to get delivered, but there is constant concern that something may go dramatically wrong with a shipment; imagine how people must have felt when their products vanished because they are on a commercial airliner that either fell out of the sky or disappeared without trace!

Luckily this is a very rare occurrence...and has never happened to us. Until now.

Recently we were excited to sign with DHL for delivery of our product worldwide. Not only do they have an outstanding reputation as a global shipper, they enable us to track every product that leaves our facilities in New Zealand - all the way (almost) through to delivery to the customer.

When added to yet another shipping service called 'aftership' this combination is one that we have been awaiting eagerly ever since we started this business almost 18 years ago - that is some time!

Still...we are mortified to report that DHL - or someone somewhere- seems to have dropped the ball.
A shipment we sent December 3 has gone missing. Obviously our affected customers are less than happy with us. Understandably we are not that impressed either.

In a world where shipping is everything...we feel our reputation is in jeopardy. While most customers are extremely forgiving and understanding, some take such disruption personally and have not been slow in venting their displeasure to us.We in turn have passed our concerns to our local DHL customer representative, who have, in turn, escalated the issue through the shipper's global delivery network.

Because every package has a tracking number on it we believe the errant items will eventually make a reappearance. Unfortunately it may not be soon enough to forestall our replacing the missing items or finalising a refund.  Such are the joys of being a global trader in a world where one small error can cause a long-lasting downstream effect.

To all those long standing Nutshell customers...thanks for being so understanding. If you are one who has been caught in this maelstrom...rest assured we are working hard to untangle knots in the shipping string.

Annual Summer Savings - Now ON!

It's become a tradition; every year we offer a ten percent saving on products during the month of June.

That's because most of our customers are US based (or someplace in the Northern hemisphere) and it seems only right to celebrate the good weather with them - in a positive manner.

The discount runs through the end of June and is right across the board. Every product and add-on accessory has the discount applied to it.

There's never a better time to catch us at our best and invest wisely in a Nutshell. For yourself or for a true friend; because that's what friends do for each other.

In a Nutshell - the art of designing smartphone accessories

In a nutshell, the world of cellphone accessories and Smartphone designs size formats are constantly changing. Apple's new iPhone 6 is said to be longer, while both the Samsung Galaxy 5 and the HTC One M8 are both longer than their predecessors. 

At Nutshell our more than 17 years experience in designing holsters and cases in New Zealand to meet the global cellphone accessories marketplace and accommodate the ever changing size formats in smartphone designs is a challenge that we are happy to accept. 

Our custom smartphone accessories are leather smartphone holsters, tailor made to fit the smartphones they are designed for.

iPhone 4 bumpers (Photo credit: Nicolas Fleury)

Looking back over our long association with PDAs, cellphone accessories and Smart phone cases and and our users; we have touched about every sector and segment of society; from the ultra-rich to the geeky poor. 

In a  nutshell there's hardly a town in the United States does not have one Nutshell in its midst; some soul still protecting their valuable mobile in one of our little leather smartphone holsters that really are works of art,. Pretty they may not be, but do the job - they certainly do.

In the developing world of Smartphone accessories designs there are many many different ways of crafting leather smartphone holsters. It is not just about the finish, or the material itself. The finish you expect to be as good as possible, and the material used has to live up to the need to protect the device and provide a long and satisfactory user experience. 

That's the challenge, the designs for cellphone accessories and Smartphone accessories need to be constantly changing to stay one jump ahead of the opposition.

Based as we are - around the back of the planet in a small group of islands called New Zealand in the South Pacific, we have the luxury of eyeing the Smartphone designs that are generated by our competitors in other parts of the world. Many build their leather smartphone holsters specifically to meet the needs of a single device, without any regard to the user's future needs and expectations.

In a nutshell, we disagree. We build our tuff as nuts cases and nutshell smartphone holsters to provide a lifetime of service, without regard to any single smartphone or other mobile device; our cellphone accessories and smartphone accessories are built to last and will hold many like-sized devices (one at a time obviously). 

Quite simply we believe that while others sell you a case to protect your current device, we sell you an investment in the future; providing your next smartphone, and the one after that are roughly the same size, they should comfortably fit into one of our leather Smartphone holsters.

And in a nutshell we also believe that beauty should always be more than skin deep. In a world where cheapness and expediency are too often taken as the most important items on the designer's check list, we believe the use of top quality fittings and high class materials counts for way more than a cheap price sticker. 

As we continue to strive to succeed in a world full of cheap and nasty knock offs, in a nutshell we intend to incorporate a growing array of new materials, like carbon fibers and natural antistatic fibers into our products so that we maintain our philosophy that perfection is not always cheap, but to carry the tuff as nuts label it will always be the best.

Getting IT right

Just posted a couple of segmented email messages out to our customer database in the past couple of weeks....one about the cases we offer for the new iPhone 5 and the other a general release (to non-apple users) about Nutshell cases that we have matched to a slew of new mobile Smartphones that have hit, or are about to hit, the markets.

Unfortunately, while we got a lot of positive responses back for the new cases for the iPhone 5, we managed to get it quite wrong - and have had to go back to the drawing board. We assumed many folk would be putting their latest handheld into a security/protective cases as soon as they got it...only to be told, in no uncertain terms, that that was NOT always the case. And that there are lots and lots and lots of people out there who are so enamored with their latest Apple device there is NO WAY they are ever going to wrap it in some nondescript protective covering.

That really told us, and had us scrambling to get it RIGHT!

So right now we have three new knives in production specifically for the iPhone 5; one is for a case with a flap and one with the case with a tab - that can hold the "naked" phone snugly without any sort of protection in place.  And a third is for a new "sideways" pouch that is the same as the existing pouch we offer for the "naked" iPhone 4...only it is 10 mm longer - to cater for the increased length of the iPhone 5.

The new holsters will share the new case number of #268...while the new pouch for the iPhone 5 will be known as the #214.

(What are knives? They are the sharp steel forms that cut the leather that covers the Nutshell products.)

We expect to have these knives available 'any day now' - and look forward to getting lots and lots of positive feedback...and lots and lots of orders...as a result.

Well, you certainly cannot say we do not try.

What was that old saying?
" ...you can please some of the people some of the time....but never all of the people all of the time."

Very true...and that means, from a marketing perspective...never taking anything for granted. Not even after 15 years of closely following the developing mobile handheld market and daring to think that maybe you know what it is people will want, before they know it themselves. A very dangerous assumption.  But we know our customers will, as always, forgive us.

Don't forget, Christmas is just around the corner...what are you going to get them this year?

:-)