Temporary Services with Covid-19

The coronavirus has affected every part of our business and supply chain, and we’ve had to adapt quickly to fulfil orders and deliver our paint to your homes.

TINS

Our tin manufacturer is based in London. They make our lovely bespoke sized tins but have been affected with reduced staff and the factory that normally makes and supplies them with the labels that they apply to our tins, shutdown because of the virus. This meant they had to search like crazy for another label company to supply them. Coupled with extra demand this has all lead to an increased lead time for our tins.

With sales orders at 4 times (6 times on some days) the normal level we had to get temporary substitute tins in and turned to a company that we know of old. They supplied us with great 2.5 litre tins but they’re a different size and shape to our normal tins. We also turned to our lovely local printers St Andrews Press who printed hundreds of emergency labels for us to apply to these tins.

The labels not only mean it takes us twice the time to bottle as we have to hand apply labels to each tin, front and back, but they are made of paper stock that reacts to metal and can easily develop air bubbles.

Our temporary 750ml tins have had to come from another supplier and many of them have rust on the outside. This rust doesn’t look great but it is superficial so the paint inside is still of the same high quality.

BOXES

All of our boxes are bespoke sizes to fit our tins and combinations of. Our box manufacturer has also been affected by the virus with reduced staffing and increased volume of sales so supply to us is delayed. So, more temporary fixes! The boxes we’re having to use don’t fit our tins brilliantly so we have to cut some down to size and pack others so the tins are nice and snug inside.

TEMP STAFF

After getting some builder friends in to rapidly expand and re-fit some of the factory, we have been able to employ some temp staff within social distancing guidelines, who are valiantly helping us to work through the backlog of orders.

TEMP SERVICE

We hope to catch-up on orders and reduce the lead time in May. However who knows what the future has in store, but we would like to thank everyone for their patience and understanding and assure you that we are doing everything humanly possible to keep paint flowing and work to a return to normal service.