Our old friend and longtime producer Ketut, pictured here with his lovely daughter, is the youngest son in a family of woodcarvers. In fact his family is from a long line of woodcarvers, and he lives in the woodcarving village! In Bali, each village has it’s specialisation, so you have stone carving villages, wood carving villages, villages of painters etc.
Our Balinese shipment has finally arrived!
We started work on our Balinese shipment back in April, we created spreadsheets of all the things that we needed, things that were running out of stock and new ideas for products that we thought might appeal to you, our lovely customers!
We produced spreadsheets,spoke to our fair trade producers in Bali, agreed prices and quantities and finally finalised our order.
Our lovely fairtrade producers then spent May & June handmaking all the products that we had ordered.
At the end of June our people in Bali collected our goods from our various producers around the island. They then expertly packed them, produced the reams of documents required for an international shipment , then finally, at the start of July, our shipment was on it’s way. By truck!!
The truck made it’s way across the island of Bali to the port of Gilimanuk, where the truck crossed to the next island of Java. It then made it’s way to the larger port of Surabaya in Eastern Java. Here our truck was unloaded and our 67 valuable boxes were loaded onto a container ship heading for Singapore.
We followed the progress of our ship on our computers. When it got to Singapore the ship was unloaded and then disappeared into an anonymous warehouse, somewhere in Singapore!
Our shipping schedule said that our shipment would be shipped onto a large container ship heading for Felixstowe a few days later.
However we had not bargained for the complete nightmare that is International Shipping! Our shipment remained for the best part of a month in the anonymous warehouse, before finally being loaded onto a monster container ship at the start of August. Think the Ever Given, that enormous ship that blocked the Suez Canal for over a week, a couple of years ago, and you’ll get an idea of the size of our ship.
Anyway to cut a very long story slightly shorter, five weeks after being loaded onto the monster container ship, our boat has finally come in. Five months after we put our order in!
Now all we have to do is pay lots of spurious charges, and the goods that we have already paid for months ago will finally arrive in our warehouse.
So next week we’ll be unloading our new stock and our stock will be replenished. Next week we’ll post about all the new things we have in stock.
