USPS Holiday Shipping Reminder & Exciting Renovations!

As the busy holiday season approaches, make sure you're ordering well enough in advance by keeping an eye on these USPS holiday shipping deadlines. 

Need an order delivered by December 24? Here's how and when you should ship.

Domestic

•	First Class Package Service: Dec 20
•	Priority Mail: Dec 21
•	Priority Mail Express: Dec 22

International

•	First Class International Package Service: Dec 1
•	Priority Mail International: Dec 1
•	Priority Mail Express International: Dec 8 This means you can safely wait for our December Signature Oil blend (spoiler, it's hot cocoa themed) to place your pre-holidays order. End of Year Vacation Many of my long-term customers know that I often take the end of the year off, and this year is no exception! NightBlooming will be closed for the holidays starting December 23 and will reopen Monday, Jan 5th. The long break is, in part, due to a serious renovation of my craft room! Right now, I have an old dining room table, a corner closet organizer, a drafting table, and a nightstand making up the surfaces of the room.  The new layout is all Ikea kitchen cabinets and concrete-gray counter tops. This means that: I will have LOTS more storage space the countner tops are all consistent height, making it more comfortable to work at and also improving workflow the counter tops will be, well, counter tops, making cleanup from things like spilled oils much easier. You can check out the interactive version here! Everyting will have to be assembled, given an additional coat or two of poly (because the oils and essential oils I work with can be brutal on surfaces), and I'd like to get the trim stained espresso, too, before all that cabinetry is in place.  Since the store won't be open you can follow along with the upgrades as they happen by following on Twitter or Instagram!

Delays in Shipping to Canda

This came along today:

The tl:dr is that because of the Canadian postal strike, orders going to Canada after July 2nd may be very, very delayed.  

So, my lovely customers due North, you might want to put in your orders now if you have them. I'll continue shipping in spite of the strike, but just keep in mind about the delays.

New labels arrive!

Selkie

Our Selkie labels are back from the professional printers! Created on oil and water resistant paper, these will hold up to wet hands and drips. We have all of our materials now, too, so look for an update on Selkie production starting soon!

Moondust

Our Moondust jars and samples had gotten updated labels awhile ago, but the refill bags were still out of date.  The new labels bring all aspects of this product together!

NB Avatar Labels

Back here we'd talked about our new shipping labels and how one of the things I missed was having the logo on them.  We've had circular labels created that match the NightBlooming avatar.  Look to find them on your packages and pinning together the tissue paper wrappings that many of our products come in!

Internationals: Let's get you some Selkie!

Because of the complex logistics concerning international crowdfunding law, Etsy could not roll out international shipping for the pilot of Fund. I had a chat with Etsy today and stressed how important my international customers were to me and proposed a couple ideas to them as to how you can participate in the Selkie campaign.  I've gotten the tentative go-ahead. 

Technically speaking you CAN participate right now.  You can purchase Selkie, but the shipping address has to be to an address with the US.  So if you've got a friend in the US willing to ship Selkie to you, or will be visiting the US at the end of this year (we project Selkie starting to ship in October) you can pop right over and back Selkie now. 

I'm also not so dense that I don't realize that that's not a great option for most of you :(

So, I've two options for you that would allow Selkie to be shipped right to you and I'm going to ask you to tell me in the comments which you want.  I want to make this call soon, so please kick this around to anyone you feel would be interested and let me know asap.  I'd like to have a solid international Selkie option by this Friday, and doing both a preorder and a shipping cost listing is not an option.  It would just get way to confusing and I don't want to risk messing up people's orders as a result. 

Keep in mind, this is only an issue during the Fund campaign.  Once that's over and all the orders are shipped, there will be a normal listing in the store forever after. 


Please note that with either option you cannot apply discount codes.  It must be the full price to match what the campaign already has posted.


Option 1: Selkie Preorder Listing
A preorder listing would be just like a normal listing for Selkie, but would not be slotted to ship until the actual Selkie campaign orders ship.  There would be a sample size 1 oz listing and a full size 8 oz listing and you could add them to your cart.  You have to check out with all of them at once for this to work properly.  Shipping would be calculated by weight, and when Selkie starts shipping it would go out behind anyone that backed before you.  You cannot add other items to your order unless you plan on waiting for those items to ship with Selkie much later this year. 

The down side to doing it this way is that it doesn't actually back the Selkie campaign.  It doesn't make the little bar move, and doesn't show Etsy and the world how much you would love to try this detangler.  Obviously it's important to me to show the success of the campaign, and while I'm sure you'll like to contribute directly, I wasn't sure if the hassle in Option 2 is worth the additional steps to you (and me) or not and wanted to leave the choice up to you.


Option 2: Selkie Shipping Cost Listing
This option is more complicated, but makes the little bar move. For this option you would purchase whatever bottles you wanted through the actual Selkie Campaign (which means you'll have to list a US shipping address even if you have zero intention of it going there). Then you'd:

• leave me Message to the Seller in checkout telling me what actual address you want the bottles sent to
• have to go to shipping cost listings and check out with listings that essentially just cover the additional cost to ship the bottles (by weight based on the options you chose) to you.  I would adjust this so that the shipping costs that are already rolled into the cost of Selkie in the campaign are applied to you. So if you purchased two 1 oz bottles and  one 8 oz bottle you will need to add a quantity of 2 of the 1oz shipping listings and a quantity of 1 of the 8oz shipping upgrades to your cart and check out with them all at once so the weight/cost is calculated properly.  Just like with the previous option, you cannot add other items to your order unless you plan on waiting for those items to ship with Selkie much later this year. 

Essentially this is almost exactly like Option 1 except that you have to check out twice (once with the campaign and one with the shipping option(s) you need. Then it's on me to match up addresses and get labels printed properly


My deepest apologies that this is complicated, but many international customers expressed wanting to participate.  It's a little more legwork on my end and on your end, but you wonderful international customers are worth it :)  

Which option would you like to see for shipping Selkie internationally?

Option 1: Selkie Preorder Listing

Option 2: Selkie Shipping Cost Listing

 

pollcode.com free polls

Please vote in the poll and leave comments below. I'll go with the most common one, or if it's close, go with the one that shakes out to making the most logistical sense. 

Calculated Shipping & New Shipping Labels

Calculated Shipping

I've talked a little in the past how shipping on Etsy was a messed up game of averages.  Check out the "How do you set shipping costs?" section in the link for more detail, but the short version is I had to create these shipping profiles and assign them to products.  It entailed a lot of fine-tuning them again and again and again.  If the guessing game was wrong and I was short on what Etsy collected for postage I was kinda screwed because I wasn't going to go back to a customer and ask for extra to cover the difference.  If it was too much over, I was doing refunds.  There was also no way to do shipping upgrades at checkout. 

Calculated shipping is a new feature in Etsy that live-calculates the amount of postage needed to send a parcel from me to you.  Each item in the shop is now assigned a weight and dimensions (meaning I had to weigh and measure every individual item, which is why this all took a little while to get off the ground).  When you add items to your cart, Etsy adds up the total weight for the package and then checks my address, then yours, and then figures out what it would cost to ship a package of that weight from here to there.  It also adds in a very small ( 50 cents) shipping and handling fee per item to cover the cost of packaging materials, labels, tape, time spent packing, etc.

As a bonus, you now get to select from multiple shipping options if you'd like things there faster, or pick the lowest rate if the box doesn't need to break the sound barrier along the way.

If you want to check the shipping on a single item, it's on the Shipping & Policies tab.  To see multiple items and combined shipping you'll have to check in the cart.

New Shipping Labels

My international customers have never seen what the domestic labels look like, but it was like this:

I used a postage printing program called Endicia that allows me to create my own (domestic) labels and print all labels (domestic and international) from home.  This was a huge boon over having to address and weigh all the boxes and take them to the post office, but the process was still pretty inefficient.

It went something like this:

• Take all the items for an order and put them in their box/bubble mailer
• Weigh the package
• Put the package weight and the customer's name on the package
• Put the package in my shipping bin
• Repeat for every order (usually 8-20 on the nights I pack, which is very late at night on Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays)
• Once all the orders are packed, go to the office, open Photoshop and my postage printing program
• Enter the address and weight for a package and create the label.
• Pull the labels into Photoshop and arrange it on an 8 1/2 - 11 page (usually I can get 5-6 labels per full sized sheet)
• Enter the tracking information on Etsy
• Mark the order as shipped on Etsy and send the confirmation email
• Repeat for every order
• Print out the sheets of labels
• Cut out the labels by hand
• Play hide and seek, matching the right label to the right package
• Peel and stick the labels
• Put all the packages back in the shipping bin and set them out for the post

On a night with 8-10 orders, assuming every product was already packaged with a label (which is another ongoing battle), boxing would take me two or three hours with labels taking another hour+.  For such an inefficient process, I was pretty fast with it in the end, but yeah, still inefficient.  

Enter two things:  Etsy shipping labels, and a new label printer.

Etsy Shipping Labels

Etsy recently paired with Endicia (which is the same company I was already using) to allow sellers to print labels right off Etsy and be charged through there rather than buying postage for my account and having it deducted that way.  Here's what it looks like on my end:

The arrow is pointing to the option that says "Format for 4x6 label printers"

Here I enter the final package weight (if it was a little different than the calculated weight), enter a message to the buyer, pick a few other variables and the decide what I want the output to be.  By doing it this way, the tracking number is automatically assigned and sent to the buyer in one step, eliminating the chance of me screwing it while entering it. 

I go through each order this way and then at the end print them all out to one PDF document that's sized for 4x6 labels.  They look like this:

Lame, I know.  I hate them.  That these labels look so... not special is one of the main reasons I held out doing this for so long.  I like the idea that my customers get excited (at least I hope you do!) when you see the pretty NightBlooming logo on your package.  I'm currently looking into a sticker I could add to the label to make it a little more special again.

If I actually had magical packing faeries, I'd be the happiest person ever.

But, regardless, I'd love your thoughts.  Do you like the logo on your packages?  Does it make them feel special or am I being a little silly?

New Label Printer

In any event, design aside, the new labels can be printed on this little guy:

Come on, for a printer he IS pretty cute!

The label paper is thermal-printed, so it doesn't consume ink.  The labels are also glossy, peel and stick, and much more weather-resistant than the ones I was previously using. 

So what's the process now?

A lot more streamlined.  I just ran my first night with the new labels and printer and already tell it's going to be a massive time improvement once I get a into a groove with the new system.  The process is now like this:

• Take all the items for an order and put them in their box/bubble mailer
• Write the customer's name on the package
• Check the final weight and enter it into the Etsy label field
• Repeat for all items
• Purchase and print all the labels
• Play hide and seek, matching the right label to the right package
• Peel and stick the labels
• Put all the packages back in the shipping bin and set them out for the post

MUCH better.  I'm hoping over time I'll be able to make better improvements, like printing each label as I go (right now that feels like a time sink because I have to go through the label purchase process per each label rather than all at once and print them at once, but there might be a better way).

I know this all wasn't the most exciting stuff ever, but I knew people would notice when they started getting labels that looked differently and wanted to give the why.  As always, I appreciate your feedback.  That you have the best experience possible and reliably get your packages for a reasonable rate is super-important to me.  I just bought a $4.50 eyeliner pencil today and they charged me $5 to ship it.  I promise, I am never going to be that person :)

Pricing Adjustments & Enyo War Goddess Henna Preview

I can't begin to express how grateful I am to everyone who responded to my previous post about needing to make some changes to NightBlooming.  Thank you so very, very much for being sweet and understanding.  I've read and re-read both the post and the comments so many times.  I wanted to be honest and in return I feel like I can move forward with my plan to make NightBlooming full time, eventually.

 

Pricing Adjustments

I took a (much needed) three-day break to visit my best friend in another city.  Since the store was closed, I made the changes I outlined a bit in the previous post.  Here's what you'll notice:

 

• Prices on Salves, oils, herbal rinses, scrubs, dry shampoos, etc. all got bumped a little. These were the products that either hadn't had their prices updated in 6 years, or had been priced with the old, wildy out-of-date, pricing equation I use.
• Prices on sticks, barrettes, pins, accessories, etc.  as well as all herbal hair colors and teas stayed the same.

Shipping Adjustments

Not a lot changed here.  I think the only things that got adjusted specifically were the items with the "Medium Herbal" weight.  You can't see the pricing categories, it's a back end grouping, but it's the "herbal stuff between 6-13 ounces".

 

Germany and the UK got added as specific shipping destinations, just like Canada.  I didn't change anything there, but what this lets me do is more specifically tweak pricing in the future.  Although the USPS site tells me that shipping to the UK is the same as Germany, it isn't in practice.  This will let me hone in on the bare-minimum shipping to each of these international destinations.  As I send more packages to other countries and can get a good feel for those specific rates, I'll add more.

 

 

Discounts, Promo Codes & Sales

NightBlooming sales never happened.  Discount codes were pretty rare.  Largely this was because I just didn't have the margin to allow them while making any money at all. One upside of the new pricing structure is that now I can give my loyal customers more sales, discount codes, and other promotional offers!  I'm very excited to be able to have the flexability to do this.  There's actually going to be one coming up soon for Panacea specifically, so if you love your salve (and good gods, some of you do!), keep an eye out for an upcoming post.  I'll be offering a discount code in exchange for telling me a little bit about your hair and which salve it likes best.  Anyone that participates also gets entered in a drawing to win some of their favorite salve!

 

Enyo: War Goddess Henna Hair Dye

I've wanted to do this one for awhile.  It isn't open for general sale yet, but if you're a lover of deep, deep henna red, this one will be for you!  We hope to release this in the upcoming weeks.

 

Enyo was the Greek goddess of war, the female counterpart and close companion of the god Ares. Often depicted with deep red hair and covered in blood, Enyo so delighted in warfare that she even refused to take sides in the battle between Zeus and the monster Typhon, preferring the fight to go on as long as possible.

 

This blend is our darkest red, trending towards ruby. Keep in mind, multiple applications will deepen the color from orange, to ruby red, to burgundy. Because of the henna content, Enyo dye will still flare orange in the sunlight.

 

This herbal hair color would be fitting for a war goddess, imparting vivid orange tones to lighter colored hair, and giving deep red warmth as well as amazing natural conditioning properties to darker colored hair. Enyo War Goddess Herbal Hair Color is made entirely from powdered herbs, and contains no chemicals, metallic salts, or other additives.

 

Ingredients: Henna (Rajastani), Elder berry, hibiscus, beet root, triphala powder, indigo. 

 

 

What the hell happened with our international postage rates?

If you ordered recently, especially if you're an international customer, you no doubt noticed a pretty significant hike in postage rates.  It surprised me, too.

I knew postage rates were going up, but they've done that before.  The last two or three times it's happened it was a small enough increase that I didn't raise the shipping prices on Etsy to compensate.  Etsy shipping is a game of guessing and averages, so sometimes I lose out a little on shipping, and I'm okay with that.

So when I heard there was going to be another round of postage hikes, I thought I'd wait it out and adjust as needed, not figured it'd be THAT bad, I mean it never had been before, right?

Wrong >_<

The night of the first postage increase I lost about $4/ international order.  And I have a LOT of international orders.  So, sadly, I really had no choice to raise my shipping rates this go round.

The rates went up a little to US and Canada, but anywhere else outside of the US the rates went up a lot.  Here's the complete list of international postage changes:

So what does that mean in more NightBlooming-specific terms?  

• The cost of shipping a single/pair of hair sticks went up about $4
• Heavier herbal products (bottles of oil and 8oz hair salves) had their rate increased a bit more
• Packages are still not insured/tracked unless you decided to pay the extra to upgrade from First Class Package International to Priority Mail International.

I hate this as much as you guys do.  I love my international customers and always prided myself at keeping my shipping rates as low as possible.  I don't make any extra money on it.  It's the bare minimum I can charge to cover my costs, my shipping program, and packing materials.  Please rest assured, that's the same.  If I can find places where I can adjust it back down, I will.

So what do we do?

For my international customers here's a few things we can try:

• Group Orders- If you guys want to go in and have a bunch of people buy a ton of stuff and then have one person repack and reship it from within your home country it'd save some shipping costs.  Depending on what was going into a group order, I could send it in a Flat Rate Box.  This is especially worthwhile if there's a lot of heavy items (large bottles of Triple Moon Oil, Moondust in glass bottles, 2 ounce and 8 ounce Panacea Hair Salves, etc).   I haven't tried this yet, but I'm willing to have a go at it if you guys are :)  
•  Lifting of Custom Order Restrictions- Right now there's a limit of one custom order per person per order (i.e. you couldn't be on the custom order list for more than one item at a time).  I've been a little soft on that recently, but it still stood as the official policy for me to fall back on in case I got overwhelmed with customs (again).  For international customers, I'm raising that limit to 3.  You could probably talk me into more if my list is manageable  So if you have a few ideas, we'll get them all done at once so you can combine shipping.
• Holding Items to Combine Shipping-  I'd be happy to set items aside so you can build up a few things and then have them sent all at once together.  The caveat to this is that you still have to pay for each item up front, but I'd adjust the shipping cost and refund you the overage.  

I'm racking my brain on how to keep this manageable for you guys, but I am utterly open to more suggestions. If you have any ideas, please leave them in the comment box below!

Let's Talk About Shipping

I'll be honest, I know nobody reads shop polices, the endlessly repeated shipping information at the bottom of each listing, or the shop announcement at the very top of every store.  You know what?  Half the time I don't either.  (Although you and I both should, there's usually some good stuff there including notices, special offers, and discount codes.)

But recently I've gotten some questions about shipping so lets grab a nice cuppa and give this topic some attention.  Then at least you can gloss over my shipping policies without feeling guilty about it. ;)

All about Shipping!

What Mail Class do you Ship?  ***This one is important.  Read this.***
All packages are, by default, are shipped First Class USPS, without insurance and without delivery confirmation.  Why?  Because this allows me to keep shipping costs down for you and 99.99% of the time, this works just fine. However, this is important to keep in mind because with First Class USPS:

• packages are not insured unless you convo me to add this as an option
• packages cannot be tracked, unless you convo me to add Delivery Confirmation (and at that it doesn't track anything, it just tells me when/if it was delivered)

Selecting either of these options may require you to send addition funds.

First Class International Mail cannot be insured  and cannot be tracked and will require an upgrade to Global Priority Mail to invoke either of these options.  I can, generally, ship a package across the pond va First Class International for $8, which covers all my costs (see below) and the cost of postage.  Just to upgrade to Global Priority Mail (the cheapest class of mail that can be insured) will bring the cost of postage alone to over $20.  This is not even factoring in my costs, the costs of insurance, or the cost of tracking.  Now you're looking at a $25-$30 postage cost on pretty light package.  Heaven help you if you're importing Panacea's Salve by the vat (and some of you do).

If you live in the US and need the package faster, convo me and we can discuss shipping it via UPS overnight or 2 Day for an additional fee.

What is included in shipping costs?
My shipping prices are set to cover the cost of shipping, packaging materials, the monthly fee I pay for my print at home postage service, and a portion of the Etsy and PayPal fees incurred with each transaction.  The last order of boxes I made was $230 + $25 shipping to me.  Let me be the first person to say that there are few purchases as unsatisfying as empty boxes that you have to pay to have shipped to you.  ;) 


How do you set shipping costs?
I guess and modify from there. Thankfully the guessing stage was a few years ago, now I'm just tweaking as I go.  The way it works is that Etsy will let me set a rate to a loooooong list of countries for each item.  When you pick an item on Etsy it takes the highest shipping cost out of all those items as the base.  Then, for each additional item, it adds a secondary (lesser) shipping costs for each.  I do my very, very best to balance this as I go and check what my actual postage costs are against the one Etsy came up with, and I modify as necessary.  What this means is that sometimes a package might cost me less than I charged to ship, and sometimes it costs me more than what I charged to ship.  It's impossible for me to get it exact every time as postage costs vary by weight.  It it's close enough (within a dollar or so) we just roll with the difference.  Just know that if postage is a smidge more than what you paid, I will never ask you to make up the difference, but if postage is way under what I expected I will refund you the difference via PayPal. If shipping is off, that's my fault, not yours.

How fast/when do you ship?
Barring extraordinary circumstances I ship within two business days of receiving your order.  I pack orders very late in the evening on Sunday, Tuesday and Thursday nights.  This means that parcels actually go out first thing in the morning on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. You will be notified when your package has been shipped, and will also be told in advance if your package will take more than two business days to ship.

Lost Packages
I feel horrible and miserable each time something doesn't arrive where it should. I wish I had a magical army of faeries to carry your packages safely, directly and instantaneously to you.   But I don't.  I have to rely on human beings, and they, like I, am fallible. The bottom line is this: I am not responsible for lost packages. If your package is lost let me know and I will file an insurance claim on it *IF* you paid for insurance. Keep in mind that First Class International packages are NOT insured and may take up to 3 months to arrive if they are waylaid in Customs. If it's around Christmas/New Year's?  Ugh. :(

It is very, very rare something goes missing and is never returned to either me or the intended recipient. Over the course of almost 5,500 items this has happened only twice that I am aware of. If you choose not to insure a package, please keep in mind that once I send it I have no way to recover your losses if it never arrives or is very delayed. If you are concerned about this, please add insurance, delivery confirmation, or if you're not in the US, upgrade to International Priority Mail. I reserve the right to upgrade to these options if the value of a package is quite high. 

Packaging

All sticks are shipped in soft Flannel bags inside boxes.  Pins and other jewelry may be shipped in boxes within padded envelopes.  Sample sizes of herbal products are shipped in padded envelopes, and upgrades to boxes happen with larger sizes.


Whew!  So, now that I have a fresh cuppa, any questions, comments or concerns?