Why we hold no inventory, and what that means for you as a buyer

There is no warehouse. There is no shelf with your order on it. Everything in this catalogue is made or shipped only after a customer has paid, which is a structural decision rather than a temporary stage, and it changes a surprising number of things about buying from us. Some of them are in your favour and some are not. This is the whole list.

Three ways a shop can work

The first is to buy stock, keep it, and post it from your own premises. You control quality because you have handled every unit, you can post same day, and you carry the risk: money tied up in boxes, and markdowns on whatever did not sell.

The second is made on demand. Nothing exists until it is ordered, which is how printed goods usually work now, and the trade is that you wait for manufacture.

The third is that the supplier holds the stock and ships it when you tell them to. We work the second and third ways and never the first. Nothing in this catalogue has ever sat in a room belonging to us.

What that buys you

Breadth, mostly. A small shop holding stock can afford to carry perhaps forty things, and they have to be the forty things most likely to sell. Holding none means we can carry an odd cast animal that two people a month want, next to the pieces that sell steadily, and neither has to subsidise the other.

Price stability is the second one. A shop with stock has a markdown cycle: full price, then twenty percent off, then a clearance bin. We have no reason to discount and nothing to clear, so a price here does not move much and waiting for a sale is mostly a waste of your time.

The third is less obvious and matters to us. Unsold stock gets destroyed. The quantities involved across this industry are substantial, and a shop that never orders a unit nobody wanted never has a pallet to get rid of. That is a genuine benefit of the model, and it is one of the few arguments in its favour that is not about our cash flow.

The first cost is time

Ordering happens after you pay, so the clock starts later than it would at a shop with shelves. Some items come from a warehouse in the United States and arrive quickly; others cross an ocean and take a good deal longer. We set out the real windows, the tracking behaviour and the customs position separately, and that article is linked at the foot of this one. It is the one to read before you order anything on a deadline.

The short version for planning purposes: work backwards from the date you need the thing and add slack, and if the date is fixed, prefer an item that ships from inside your own country.

Your order may arrive in pieces

Because different products come from different suppliers, a basket with three things in it can become three parcels from three places, with three different arrival dates. There is no central point where an order gets packed into one box, because there is no central point at all.

This is the part that generates the most email. Two of the three turning up and the third being a week behind is normal rather than a sign that anything has gone wrong. If you want things to arrive together, the reliable method is to order them separately so each has its own tracking, rather than hoping a single order holds itself together.

The one place it is worth planning around is a set bought as a present. A pair like the Long Night Pair is one product and ships as one thing, where two separately listed items bought together are two shipments.

We do not see the unit before it ships

This is the honest disadvantage and we are not going to dress it up. A shop with stock opens the box, finds the three bad castings and throws them away. We cannot do that, because the parcel goes from the supplier straight to you.

What we do instead is work on the selection rather than the inspection. One supplier per product, so there is no silent substitution halfway through a season. Samples bought and handled where we can get them. And a hard look at the categories where failure is likeliest: thin projecting parts, plating on edges, and anything with a mechanism.

The other half of it is that we need you to tell us quickly when something arrives wrong, because a fault we hear about once is an accident and a fault we hear about three times is a product that should come off the site. Photographs of the problem are worth more to us than a description, and they are what gets a line pulled.

Things can disappear while you are looking at them

Availability is somebody else's decision. A supplier can stop making a thing, run out of a component, or quietly change a material, and the first we know of it is an order that cannot be placed. That is why some pages say an item is coming back rather than offering it.

What you will not see here is a stock counter, a number of units remaining, or a line saying somebody else is looking at this. We do not know how many units exist, so any number we printed would be invented, and invented urgency is the oldest trick in the trade. A seasonal item like a set of baubles genuinely does stop being orderable at some point in the winter, and when it does the page will say so rather than counting down to it.

What it means for the way you should order

Size carefully, because an exchange is not a quick operation when the replacement has to be ordered from the supplier from scratch. Measure, read whatever chart exists, and ask us before ordering rather than after.

Buy gifts earlier than feels necessary. Order fast and slow items separately if you want them separately. Keep the confirmation email, because it is the document that says which supplier a line came from. And raise anything wrong straight away rather than waiting to see whether it settles down.

None of that is unusual advice. It is just that with no inventory behind the shop, each of those small decisions carries slightly more weight than it would somewhere with a warehouse and a returns desk. Something compact and robust like a pair of cast brass bats is close to risk-free on all of these counts, which is exactly why solid cast objects make better first orders than anything with a size in it.

Questions people actually ask

Do you keep stock of what you sell?

No. Nothing is made or shipped until a customer has paid for it. Every item is ordered from its supplier after the sale, which is why the catalogue can be wide and why some items take a long time to arrive.

Why did my order arrive in separate parcels?

Different products come from different suppliers, and each ships directly. There is no single place where an order is packed, so a basket with three items can become three parcels with three arrival dates.

Why is there no stock count on the product pages?

Because we do not hold the stock and do not know the real number. Any figure we displayed would be invented, so we show none and say plainly when something is no longer orderable.