Whew…I’m sure glad that’s over.  I love Christmas, don’t get me wrong.  It’s just that furniture factories in Québec always close for two weeks just before the big day, and the stress level of making and shipping everyone’s LofaBed orders is – shall we say – high! And the pressure isn’t limited to just manufacturing…oh, no.  At this time of year, getting the trucks to come when they promise is an equally daunting task.

So it was with great trepidation that we entered the week of December 12th with 15 LofaBed orders…with everyone in need of their new sofa bed for the holidays!  Now I’m experienced enough to know NOT to over-promise. So I’ve learned that the MOST I can commit to, is to have someone’s LofaBed made and picked up from the factory before Christmas.  I have enough influence over the factory for that.  But what I can never predict is the freight part of the equation.  We deal with Western Logistics for Western Canada, VA for Eastern Canada, and Normandin Transit for the States.  All of them send 53 footers, and NONE of them comes when they’re called.  Well, not just before Christmas, anyway.

Before I could give any thought to the freight situation, I had to make sure the factory and I were on the same wavelength.  They have other furniture to make besides LofaBeds, and I had to make sure they had my back in terms of keeping my promises to customers.  So I faxed them a list of the 15 pending pre-Christmas orders, and asked them to forecast when each of them would be ready to be picked up.  And I also wrote each customer to ask if waiting for delivery after the holidays was a possibility.  So when Tammy Binder, of Toronto, wrote that I shouldn’t stress out because she was going to be out of town and, therefore, could wait till January, I wrote:

I was able to get two more orders delayed until January, so now SOME of the pressure had been removed. Then came Friday, the 16th, the day VA promised to pick up the majority of our Christmas LofaBeds.  But they never came!  And they didn’t come on Monday either.  Which forced me to communicate THIS little ditty:

By now I was beginning to be worried that customers might think I was giving them the ‘ol runaround because, afterall, they’re still buying a sofa-bed sight unseen, and they don’t know ME from Adam.  So APPEARANCES are almost as important as reality…and at this stage, I didn’t APPEAR to have things in hand. When VA actually SHOWED UP on Tuesday, I was thrilled to be able to write this:

Picking up an order at the factory is step number one.  Step number two is actually shipping it from VA’s warehouse in Montréal to its destination, somewhere between Ontario and the Maritimes.  I realized, by now, that home delivery before Christmas was a pipe dream, but if I could just get them shipped before the 25th, that would be a small miracle.  So when VA called and committed to shipping all of my orders BEFORE the 23rd:

Which made a number of people VERY happy.  Now it came down to Normandin, our furniture-only carrier to the U.S.  Normandin has hundreds of rigs on the road, so when they finally get around to picking up a LofaBed at the factory in St. Anicet, it’s only a matter of DAYS before they get it delivered to virtually anywhere in the States. When they arrived at the factory late in the afternoon of the 22nd…it was a tremendous relief to all of us.  And I was able to finish off my customer correspondence thusly:

Merry Christmas to all!

Mitch Wapen
www.lofasofa.com
lofasofa@videotron.ca
877-424-1431