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HLJ News |
Hi, everybody. I'm Scott Hards, founder and president of HobbyLink Japan. We've got some really exciting stuff happening at HLJ these days, and I'd like to share that with you.
As a lot of you may know from the announcements we've had on our web site or from advertisements we've placed in magazines, 2007 marks the tenth year of our business as a company. Back in 1995 I started HLJ as sort of a side business, but thanks to the incredible response that I got from customers like you, it quickly became far more than I could handle. So I took the web site down, gathered some people, some money, and put together a simple product catalog, and then we relaunched in January of 1997 as a real company. The ten years since then have just been an incredible ride, with growth that at times has frankly been very hard to manage, thanks to repeat business by dedicated customers like you.
For nearly nine of those ten years, we've been operating out of a warehouse complex in Tatebayashi; that's a small city about 35 miles north of Tokyo. And it's a rental facility. As such, it's not particularly impressive, and that's probably why we've never shown it off to our customers before. But I'd like to actually do that right now.
Our facility is simply one large warehouse, and a small office building -- that's that little yellow house-like structure on the left there. The warehouse itself is about 660 square meters, or 7100 square feet. Overall, we've got it split into two areas. The pallet storage area that you can see here, where products are kept in their original cartons, and then another area where products are broken out onto standard flat shelves. As you can see, things are packed just about as tightly as they can get, and still leave us any room to get work done in.
It's out in the warehouse where we do all the picking and packing of customer orders. Our picking staff pulls the merchandise needed for each order from the shelves and sorts them into these plastic containers. Our packing team in turn then checks the items that have been picked and, if all is well, packs the order carefully so that it can reach you in the best condition possible. On busy days, each of our packing staff may handle as many as 120 individual customer orders.
Twice a day the local branch of the Japanese post office sends a truck over to HLJ to pick up the hundreds of orders now ready to go. That marks the start of a journey to the other side of the world for most of those little brown boxes, as the vast majority of our customers are located in North America and Europe, at least an ocean away from us.
Meanwhile, over in the office area, catalog staff are inputting data about new products, while others scan packaging or take photographs of new items for the HLJ web site catalog. To finish off that catalog, a team of four people reviews every new product that comes in, and prepares the snappy commentary for our web site that we hope our customers appreciate, because it sure is a lot of work!
So, that's our quick two-minute introduction to HLJ's facilities. So what's all the 'exciting stuff' that I mentioned a couple of minutes ago?
Well, about a year ago, I decided that there was no simply no way we could continue to operate out of our present warehouse. We need more space for open shelving, more space for sorting and packing, more space for new employee desks, even more space for cars in the employee parking lot! So we're taking the plunge! With the help of the good cash flow that the business we've been able to generate has given us, plus of course a lot of help from a local financial institution, we've been able to build our own new office and warehouse complex.
Construction started back in June and everything is slated to be finished by November 10. Total warehouse space in our new facility is going to be a whopping 32,000 square feet, or about 3,000 square meters. That's four and a half times the size of our current warehouse! The office area will nearly triple in size as well. And of course, we've planned for plenty of parking.
Being on the other side of the world from us, you're probably not as excited by this news as we are. It's not going to directly affect you, after all. But it will allow us to completely revamp our picking and packing procedures to speed up our turnaround time, and hopefully get your orders out to you faster than ever before. I'm sure it will take a few weeks for us to get settled in and adjusted, but we've got a lot of changes planned that should allow us to provide you with a better shopping experience at HLJ than in years past.
Unfortunately, however, between now and the week of November 19, there are going to be some unavoidable service delays here at HobbyLink Japan while we're packing everything up and moving it into our new facilities. Specifically, between November 10 and November 18, our entire warehouse operations are going to be completely closed down, so we're not going to be able to do any shipping of any kind during that period.
Along those lines, we're not going to be very quick in our responses to your emails either, because the computers, or most of them, that our staff uses to do that work are going to be packed up in boxes and probably on a truck somewhere.
Also, there's going to be a short period on the evening of November 9 or the morning of November 10, depending on your time zone, where our entire web site is offline as we move our main server units from our current location to the new facility.
If the move goes smoothly, we hope to be back up and running as normal on Monday, November 19. But of course, after a move of this size, we expect that there's going to be a few bumps and wrinkles in the new facility that need to get ironed out, so there may be some delays. We really ask for your patience during this time as we get adjusted to our new facilities, and hopefully get primed to give you services that are even better than they've ever been in the past.
You know, being able to build our own warehouse and office facility has been the most exciting and also the most challenging thing that I've done in the ten years since I started HobbyLink Japan. I'd like to take this opportunity to thank our loyal customers from the bottom of my heart for making this even possible in the first place. It's been a very exciting ten years, and I look forward to serving you again for decades to come!
Thank you so much!