Awesome Awards/Western Trophy

I am sorry for the inconvenience this caused you. We are a small trophy shop, and try to accommodate everyone, but we do have two times of the year when we are extremely busy, baseball being one of the busiest. During April-May, or sometimes May-June, depending on when school and Little League end, we can often have at least 250 orders or more due at approximately the same time. These include not only baseball, but spring soccer, band banquets, track banquets, wrestling banquets, choir banquets and any other spring sports as well as year-end club, school and graduations events from multiple elementary, junior, senior, high schools and colleges, again, all due in that time period. We have often, during our busy seasons, worked 12-18 hours a day, 6 days a week, and even worked through the night and the following day to keep up with and meet the commitments we made to our customers. November and December also tend to be very busy with fall sports, and other events during that time. We have learned from past experience, that we cannot meet everyone's needs. While you may have been disappointed that we were not able to take your order, imagine if you had ordered early and we were not able to finish the orders your order. Those people would be more than disappointed, they would have every reason to be angry if the awards for their event was not ready. In addition, since CoVid, supply chain issues have complicated ordering parts. In the past, California has a fair share of the industries' suppliers located in Ca, and it was fairly easy to order and get supplies quickly, but many have closed warehouses and moved out of state. Also supply chain issues make ordering more difficult. When we try to place an order, we are able to check the availability of products. Last year, every warehouse of every company we order from was out of blue neck ribbons for medals in every warehouse in the United States for over 3 months. Same with some medals ... certain popular medals, many sport resins and trophy parts have them scattered in various warehouses throughout the United States in small quantities. In the past year and a half, in order to get what I needed, (what I told the customers I could get) I have had to order from Washington, Arizona, Utah, Texas (they have 3 warehouses) Tennessee, Kansas, South Dakota, New Jersey, Georgia, Florida, and for one particular item, I had to order from Wisconsin because they were the only warehouse in the United States that had a full case (12 pieces) of what I needed. Even now, there are certain items that are hard to find anywhere. Almost every order we take, we have to go online to see if the product is available, and what the current price is, before we can complete the order. As you can imagine, this takes a significant amount of time to complete a customer's order, and then place the orders for the products. We had an employee who had worked for us over 20 years, who we had to let go during the CoVid restrictions because many of the events that we usually get orders from were not able to be held. For months, we did not have sufficient income to pay even half of his salary, and then some of our utilities and other business expenses. With one less person to work on jobs, our ability to take as many orders as we used to be able to do, has made it necessary to limit the number of orders we are able to handle. Again, I apologize for the inconvenience, and encourage others to order as early as possible when they are going to need awards. There will be times that we are unable to take new orders so that we can complete the orders we have already taken.

Thanks so much Rudy. It has always been a pleasure to work with you and help make your ideas come to pass.