Custom Products Take Time
The other day the neighbor offered to order me a part for my car on Amazon. “It can be here tomorrow,” he said. Yes, most of us are now familiar with the next day delivery options of the online shopping behemoth. One look at the blue vans (and unmarked other vehicles) speeding through the neighborhood serve as daily reminders.
Here’s another reminder:
Custom products typically take longer to produce and deliver.
Amazon products are sitting on a shelf ready to grab, package, and ship. But if you are looking for something with customization, then that typically requires being designed, proofed, and put into a production schedule.
Sometimes that can still happen quickly. I received a text message at 11pm on a Friday night for something needed the next morning. Artwork was emailed to me and I ran it on my digital copier to deliver it on a Saturday morning.
But other products take longer. I received a request at 6pm on a Monday for signs wanted by 3pm on Wednesday. Signs are printed on a wide format flatbed printer. The artwork needs to be arranged with other signs to print on a 4’x8’ sheet of plastic material. The order needs to be slipped in among other orders already in the queue. After printing, the signs need to be trimmed and packaged.
There are a dozen steps in the process. Experience a delay at one step and desired deadlines are missed. That happened with this project. The pre-press person had a question and delayed production until getting an answer the morning after the signs were ordered. That night-to-day delay was all that was needed to cause the product to miss getting on a delivery truck in time to meet the deadline. It was still a turnaround of two business days. Just not quite fast enough.
If you are looking for something to be produced quickly, allow time for it to happen.
Some steps that can help include:
Advance warning that an order is coming
Making sure your artwork is set up properly for the production method used
Padding the timeline to allow for delays in the process.
We can’t always be Amazon. But we still try to be amazing.