What a contest!

Holy moly!

Boy, were we surprised, and overwhelmed, and delighted when over 1700 people commented and entered Young House Love's wallflower blog contest ... with most of them clicking through to visit LaDiff's web page too.

A near-record breaker for TYH, and LaDiff has learned that when you don't dot EVERY i, weird stuff happens... more than the 'little' stuff. We thought we'd sell 12, maybe 20 sets... nonononono, we've had almost 100 requests for flowers & flutters since the contest premiered, and they are still coming in!

So... what went 'wrong'?

First, our vendor (Umbra) was out of stock on the white ones. No big deal, they'd have more in July, which was and is right around the corner, so no worries... yet.

Next, we find out that shipping these light weight but bulky little boxes ain't cheap. (Yes, we definitely should have figured that out beforehand) A few customers balked, understandably, so, we took the high road, and recommended them to other stores in their areas when we could!

Third - and this was a real surprise - our Umbra rep (shout out to John Grob, the best, most super wonderful gift & accessory rep out there) sends me a 'good news bad news' email. Good news: Umbra is reducing the price of the wallflowers & flutters. Cool... we'll pass on that new price asap! The bad news? To lower the price, they're changing the design: getting rid of the magnets and introducing a 'snap fit' feature. Now they can only be used on walls (no fridges or radiators or bulletin boards as Sherry & John had demonstrated). This news wasn't supposed to go out until June 24th, but John Grob, being John, fortunately found out early and released the info to us last week! Still... there were only about 3 sets presold that we could call & explain about the new 'snap fit' design. ...or so we thought!

#4 and this was the doozy! In updating our website to show the new 'snap fit' design and change the copy and pricing, I notice an odd number in quantity on hand: -57. How could this be? We've only had a few inquiries... Wait. Heart stops. We haven't seen ANY shopping cart orders. That's odd. Wait. Didn't another salesperson mention that customer concern about an unanswered email?... it was making sense now.

When the LaDiff website 'facelift' occurred on May 19th, the 'shopping cart' order emails had been frozen! they were NOT coming to anyone at LaDiff. No email...EGADS. And we were only catching it now - a month later!

side note... since we are not a point, click, BUY site, our customers can fill in a cart, then we follow up to complete the sale. Shopping cart orders come in about once for every 4 regular inquiries, so we hadn't noticed their absence (shame on us).

Okay - it's 5:30 on Friday night. I'm feeling beaten down and a bit stupid by not foreseeing and preventing all of these issues before they became problems (that's part of my self-written job description at LaDiff: foresee the weird stuff that MIGHT happen). Our graphic/web designer is now in Portland, OR, spending a surprise dad's day weekend with her family. Our web hosting consultant is about to leave for a week's vacation on Saturday morning. Frantic, we call everyone's cell phones and get the email problem resolved after discovering over 50 shopping cart orders waiting for follow up! And none of them knew that we had not seen them OR that the design had changed.

Valiantly, Tim and Jennie at LaDiff wrote a letter of explanation and contacted each customer individually, sorting through the orders. Our customers were very understanding (re-affirming my love of working with the public).

In the end, we've sent lots and lots of wallflowers and wallflutters to homes across America, with more to send when the backorder arrives.

Next time, you can bet your bottom dollar that ALL of our ducks will be in a tidy little row before our NEXT adventure like this. Thank you to John & Sherry of Young House Love for great traffic to the LaDiff website and for a GREAT learning experience! We cannot wait to do it again!