by orphanespresso on Tue Mar 02, 2010 8:41 pm
Hello Jerry, and everyone else. Just got up here, still in my jammies, but checked the emails... at least some of them...
I'm sorry Doug didn't call you yet. The telephone isn't part of our 'lifestyle', or 'business style'. We don't actually have one installed in the house, and the one in the shop has a fax machine hooked to it. No TV either. No radio either. We DO have computers in the house, but most all of the business emails go to the shop, which we'll arrive at, usually, some time between 4, and 6pm.
There are only 2 of us, and likely will only ever BE the two of us - we have no employees, and our kids are grown up & gone. We make a personal claim to 6 hours of leisure during the day, usually 3 hours before starting work, and 3 hours after we turn off the lights in the shop -usually about 2AM (pacific time). Many of the things we do are fairly time consuming, and require some large blocks of time, and fairly specific concentration. Rebuilding an espresso machine is best done without interruptions - getting sidetracked on a rebuild is not a good thing. We have attempted to supply an extreme amount of technical information at no charge, and without barriers to allow a person to evaluate their machine without waiting on anyone's input. Classically what happens here, is that we finish up the day's handwork about midnight, or 1 AM - is that when we should call? Probably not. So, then we move to answering emails - I type, while Doug works on grinders, and we do this for about an hour or so, sometimes we get them all answered, and sometimes we don't. But, there are only so many hours in our day, and, as far as prioritizing - every order is packed & ready to ship the next day before I turn out the lights.
During those 3 hours of 'leisure' after closing up the shop, while we wind down, we are often still doing OE work - Doug usually lists new items from the kitchen table, in the wee hours of the morning. We rarely turn in for the day before 4-5AM, and we are asleep as soon as our heads hit the pillows! Since we have no TV, Radio or telephone, we talk to each other, we answer emails, etc., it may be an odd lifestyle to some, but it's true, and it's ours...
Those of you who've visited our website may have noticed that we've been in the midst of a website changeover - new host, new shopping cart, new back-end template, etc. Our old cart was woefully inadequate in keeping track of inventory. And this job has been a monster, particularly since we are NOT computer geeks, to our chagrin, we lost emails, addresses, parts of the customer data base didn't transfer, none of the pictures were transferred correctly, and we lost parts of our 'guide' pages. All of that had to be rebuilt, page by page, item by item... Along with keeping up with our normal business stuff. Thank goodness for Google Cache - without it the Cremina rebuild guide would have been history... We now have better backups in place.
Of course, no one wants to hear whining from us about how hard we work - we DO enjoy the work, but particularly during this early growth phase of our business, we are doing the best we can to keep up. We feel we had to post here, in response to your bringing this up, but we've never offered, or made easily available, phone service, in fact, we point out that we prefer email. Of course, no way to tell for sure, but we think most of our buyers also prefer email.
As far as parts you need to rebuild a Cremina, our complete gasket set has every single gasket, or seal that you will need to rebuild your machine. As far as parts availability, everything we have in stock is listed & available for purchase. If it's not visible, it's not in stock. We have some parts that are on order, and Robert is bringing them back for us from Switzerland (he's there visiting the factory now). And, any other parts question we'd be happy to answer through email - I can't promise that your email will be answered immediately, always, but we do the best we can!
Barb & Doug
