An order arriving is a small event in a workshop of four people. The printer in the corner makes a noise, somebody looks up, and whoever is at a natural stopping point goes and deals with it. This is what happens in the hour between that noise and your parcel being on a van.
The shelf
Everything we sell is already made. There is no cutting to order, because we work in runs of about two hundred and then stop, so the bag you ordered has been sitting on the shelf in the back room since its run came off the benches.
That is also why things sell out and occasionally do not come back. When a run goes, we decide whether to make it again, and sometimes the answer is no.
The check
Your piece gets looked at once more before it is wrapped, by someone who did not make it. Hardware done up and undone. Stitching along the stress points. The inside, which is where a rushed piece shows first.
About one in forty goes back to the bench instead of into paper, usually for something nobody would ever notice: a rivet a fraction proud, a thread end left long, a slight difference in colour between a strap and its keeper. Those come back to the shelf when they are right, or they become the seconds we sell twice a year.
The paper
No plastic, no branded ribbon, no tissue with a sticker holding it shut. Brown paper, paper tape and a length of string, which is what the workshop already had and turns out to be the thing that protects leather best in a damp postbag.
Inside there is a card with the initials of whoever made it, a line about how to look after it, and the repair address. That is the only printed matter in the box. We have never sent a leaflet about our story and do not intend to start.
The cut-off
Order before two o’clock on a weekday and it leaves that afternoon. That is not a marketing promise, it is the time of the post office run: the parcels are stacked by the door from about half past three, and someone walks them round at ten past four.
After two, it goes the next working day. On a Friday afternoon it goes on Monday, and we would rather say so than pretend a parcel is moving while it is sitting in the dark of a closed workshop for the weekend.
Afterwards
Tracking arrives with the dispatch email. In the UK it is usually next day, Europe three to five, the rest of the world a week or so, and none of that is under our control once the parcel leaves Sheaf Works.
If it is not right, you have sixty days. Send it back unworn and unwashed and we refund the lot, including the postage you paid, and we pay for the return as well. You do not need to explain why, though if you tell us we will read it, because “the strap was two inches too long for me” has changed two of our patterns.
The unglamorous part
None of this is clever. It is a shelf, a check, some paper and a walk to the post office. But the number of small workshops that lose customers at this stage, after doing the hard part well, is remarkable, and it is nearly always because somebody promised a cut-off they could not keep on a busy Friday.
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