1) Warehouse move - As many of you will have experienced it's frustrating waiting for your miniatures to arrive. It's even more frustrating when you're waiting for 100 cartons of them to fulfil orders from around the world. This is an industry wide issue in wargaming caused in the main by restrictions on when we can order from our suppliers and the amount of stock that they will give us in one order on new release or in demand items. Up until now to counter this problem and ensure we can fulfil as many orders as soon as we possibly can we hold more stock than any other independent anywhere in the world in a purpose designed 5,000sqft facility but as we've grown and as we're reaching more and more of the global wargaming market demand is increasing so our stock holding has to increase.  As we've previously mentioned we're in the planning stages of our next move, this time to a strategic purpose designed 40,000sqft distribution centre, full of procedures and whizz bang technology committed to one thing and one thing alone, to ensure that you, our customer, gets their order from click to door in the fastest possible time.  We have not taken a penny from the profits in the company, it has been reinvested constantly and we will continue to do this to constantly improve our stockholding.  Our stock check back in September showed that we had nearly £350,000 of stock on hand, we have at least 30% more than that now (Feb 2011) and we still don’t have anywhere near our target stock levels for every product.

 

2) New website - When we started we tried to predict where we would be, like any business, 12, 24 and 36 months from then so we selected technology which we thought would support that plan. Our current website has supported our phenomenal growth but it is now restricting us and many of the features that the savvy internet shopper (that's you by the way) has come to expect from a web retailer we do offer but not in the best way we could. So after an assessment period of pretty much every cart system on the market, from starting with and then discounting a few for various reasons we have settled on a way forward which we're confident is not only the best cart software currently on the market but offers a feature set to the wargaming buyer which is completely unparalleled by anyone else, you know, not even 'them'. Live stock levels, social media integration, customer service interaction and much more is all there. Additionally this change in cart system has allowed us to operate distinctly different sales propositions, I can't say much more at the moment, for fear of getting lynched but it's something you're sure to like.  It's been a long and difficult road to get where we are and I know we've mentioned it a few times previously but the arduous process of end to end testing is underway and whilst we can't give a firm launch date just yet we're hopeful that the all new Wayland Games website will be up and running in fearsome fettle before the end of March 2011.

 

3) Order Processing - So we've got the big warehouse, we've got the flashy website but the bit in the middle which connects your click on our website to you writing something which is a close approximation of your signature on a courier's tablet thing is the really important bit in improving our service. Finding the solution to this problem has almost been has hard as finding the Higgs Boson (fortunately we didn't have to send Adam to Switzerland with a spade and a mining helmet) we looked and looked and looked but nothing seemed to fit every requirement we had until we found the one product, after months of searching which does make everything from buying from suppliers to shipping to customers as efficient as it possibly can be. 

 

The upshot of all of this is that we're now confident that our service and the way in which we fulfil the business we're grateful to receive from you is going to go from strength to strength to strength. We're nothing without our customers and we'll never forget that. We're very excited about these changes and we hope you are too.