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You may have noticed things are a bit messy in our store. Some t-shirts are a slightly different price than others, some products have colour names where others have color swatches, and there's sometimes a size/colour out of stock on one product but in stock on another. It's annoying (to us too.)
Here's the deal: We're in the process of switching most of our production back to our original production partner, Printful. They offer the best quality, biggest variety, and slickest technology at the most competitive price. Switching, though, is a pain. We have to re-create our products with their system, build new product pages, and then take down the old ones. Once it's all there, it will be smooth sailing, but in the meantime, things are a bit awkward.
When you place an order, we're manually setting it up in Printful whenever possible, which means it can take longer for your order to get from our site over to Printful and into production. We try to keep this to a minimum, but it can take us a day or two to cancel the order with the original printer and get the new one of to Printful.
How to avoid delays
Two things:
- Look for products that are set up for Printful. You can identify them by price. For t-shirts, look for prices of $31 (Canadian) exactly. Hoodies are priced at exactly $50 CAD. Crewneck sweatshirts are $45 CAD. Anything higher than that is likely coming from another vendor. We'll post the prices for our other product types here as we get them finalized. If your order contains only garments that are already set up in Printful, your order will go to production automatically and get out the door as quickly as possible.
- When you submit your order, use an email address that you check frequently. Keep an eye out for emails from us. You might even want to add info@eastcoastaf.ca to your contacts so that our emails don't end up in your spam folder. We will contact you by email if there are any issues with your order that require direction from you.
What's the benefit for customers?
Recently a number of our other vendors have raised their prices significantly on some garments. We had two choices: pass these costs on to you by raising prices, or finding a different way to do things. That's when we looked at Printful again, and realized that through this whole period of inflation, their prices have remained pretty stable. So rather than raise prices, we're rebuilding our store, one product at a time, with them.
They're also a leader in the industry, with consistently excellent print and embroidery quality, they're constantly introducing new and exciting technologies and garments, and they have production facilities in Canada.
Finally, they share their live inventory status with us, so you can know before you order if a particular colour or size is out of stock. Before this, we would have had to email you after your order to tell you about the issue and to ask what you wanted us to do with that item, which also caused delays in affected orders. This was becoming more and more frequent because stock levels at our existing vendors have been getting less reliable.
Will the quality fo the clothes be the same?
The quality of the garments themselves will be unchanged, because we'll ultimately be using the same shirts from the same manufacturers for our main t-shirts, hoodies and sweatshirts. For some of our other items, like hats and tank tops, we might explore some of the new options available to us, but our main products will be the same. If there are changes, they'll come in the form of different colours, or improved print quality. We might even experiment with some new techniques, and will definitely be adding some new types of products to the store.
(Email us at info@eastcoastaf.ca to let us know what you'd like to see!)
When will the changes be done?
We're not sure. We're aiming to be done both this transition and an upgrade to our store's interface (you're already seeing the colour swatches on some products) by the holiday shopping season.
At the end of the day...
We'll have a revamped store with new garments, designs and color options, live inventory updates, a streamlined process from the time you order to the time you receive your t-shirts, and reduced prices on most of our products.
Thank you for your patience.
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