San Francisco, Here We Come:
I have an interesting story about how far we are willing to go to service our customers….
One of our customers, a retail pretzel brand (Pretzel Maker), needed 2000 t-shirts for an event. While this sounds like the perfect order, the details soon brought perspiration to our brows.
Revelation 1: The T-shirts would be needed to be completed In ONE week. Ohhhhkay, we can figure that out… two days to receive the blanks and 24 hour printing shifts…
Revelation 2: Each white T-shirt was to have a design with 7 colors on the back and 3 colors on the front. But, the design wouldn’t be approved until the day the blanks arrived…
Revelation 3: The customer was on a very tight budget for this event. We would have to re-design a bit to reduce the number of colors and setups in the print in order to make it work within the budget and not lose our “shirts”.
Revelation 4: Once we got to the halfway point, we find out that the shirts are needed, not in Salt Lake where we are printing them, but in San Francisco. Yes, as in CALIFORNIA.
The budget did not allow for overnight shipping, or even 2nd day shipping, (which was the latest option available for the shirts to reach the venue in time) so we checked into trucking companies and trains…
All of our options were exhausted, but we were not going to tell this good customer “no”. So, we rented a U-Haul trailer, hooked it up and hauled them ourselves. Took turns driving and arrived on location with some time to spare (about 45 minutes).
The REALLY SUPER GOOD part of the story is this: we brought our daughter, Sierra and our niece BreckLee with us and made it a weekend vacation.
We visited old war ships and had a very nice veteran teach us all about the weapons. Visited the Golden Gate Bridge and relaxed on a pier. We giggled, sang and laughed the whole time!
Both of the girls are teens now, (Brecklee is 17 and Sierra is 13) but they both remember this trip as a great time, even though it was only 4 days (total with driving) and we were supposed to be “working”.
We are thankful to our customers for providing us with many opportunities over the years to teach our children about customer service (optimism), dedication (resilience) and hard work (fun)!
