UK Warehouse Closure Announcement
Hi all! I’ve talked about this in the UK newsletter as well as a little bit on tumblr, but I have some sad news:
May 21st was the last new product launch in the UK store.
A lot of things informed this decision, including:
We are unable to keep up with changing import laws in multiple countries
DHL has been extremely resistant in providing required the paperwork for new import laws
We cannot afford the additional expenses to work with a registered importer at this time to comply with new import laws
The new factories will not be able to send products via ground shipping, significantly increasing costs and therefore prices
There are several products still in stock in the UK store that have been sold out in the US for nearly a year. We don’t have the international customer base to sell those products, even on clearance
We don’t currently have the budget to invest in additional marketing, which is required to increase our presence internationally. When our marketing budget opens up our top priority will be customers in the 5-8xl range so we can bring back 7-8xl sizes
Running two stores is double the work, which has decreased the time we can put into developing new products, which is necessary to stay in business. We don’t currently have the budget to hire another employee to spread that work out
I’m really sad about this, and I feel like I’m letting a lot of people down. We’re keeping the door open to return in the future once we reach the size where we can justify it! Unfortunately we made the mistake of thinking opening another warehouse would increase our international customer base, but it was so confusing to customers that it actually decreased. We need to have enough international customers to lose ~20-50% of them and still have enough sales to cover cost and sell through product.
We’re working on getting DDP started as an option at checkout. DDP is when you pay taxes at checkout instead of paying a mysterious amount of money when it arrives. This will hopefully reduce the headache of international shopping. We don’t have an estimate for when this will go into effect, but hopefully it will help smooth the process!
I don’t have an exact date yet for when the UK store is closing. We’ll run a sale before closing, but it will be much shorter than the Canadian closure sale and not as steeply discounted. Any remaining product will be shipped to the US store.
