Tropical Storm Fay is passing over us here in Central Florida today and tomorrow. (Our office and warehouse are in Sanford east of Orlando between Orlando and Daytona Beach.) We have battened down the hatches so to speak and are as prepared as possible. Our offices are technically closed today however Lori, as usual, will be working - at least for a while.

Our sites are hosted out of state so this will not cause any disruption to our sites as far as ordering goes, however, our offices may experience power or internet disruptions. Our phones should continue to work as they forward to Lori’s cell phone during system outages, however, email and chat might be unavailable for a day or two which will also affect order processing.

Mail is not being picked up today, so shipments will be delayed going out by at least 1 day. We shipped just about everything we had yesterday in anticipation of this, though we are expecting several shipments in today and we do not know if UPS or Fedex are actually going to be delivering today.

Hopefully, Fay will pass over us quickly and without incident, but should there be any delay in replies or processing of orders, please bear with us and we will catch up as soon as possible. Thank you.

After a lot of thought and debate around here (and reading comments from you! Thanks!), the final (?) system we are trying hard to implement for better costumer service and communication is:

1. All orders will be processed within 24 hours of placement
2. Orders acknowledged via email within 24 hours of processing with any questions, estimated delivery date, etc.
3. All products will be ordered within 5 days from the manufacturers. Most are actually ordered within a day, but we are doing the 5 day window to allow for manufacturers that still require us to place a minimum order.
4. Email customers when we receive the shipping notice from the manufacturer with the eta of when it is due into us. We are pushing all our vendors to send us tracking number so we know when things are due to arrive.
5. Email customer when their order ships with delivery confirmation/tracking numbers posted.
6. Tracking/delivery confirmation number posted on the notes page for the order.

We are also starting a new system that will hopefully let us better track backorders. All open orders will be gone thru every Sunday with queries sent to vendors about backorders that Monday and customers updated each Tuesday/Wednesday.

We are also working on revising the return/tracking system but have yet to totally figure this one out.

And we are planning to expand the customer information section in the order history (log into your account on the site, click on “My Account” and then “Order History”) but this will be a little longer down the road.

The hardest part about all of this is maintaining it across all our stores and with vendors that aren’t as great as keeping us informed as we would like - life was easier with fewer stores and orders, but growth is good Hopefully the above will help keep our customers better informed and us on our toes!

Of course, you can always email, chat with us, or call us if there are any questions as well. We try to be available daily from 9 am to 8 pm Eastern Standard Time.

Last year, the Halloween mania took us by surprise and things were insane around here thru Christmas. This year, we are trying to get better prepared!

We are working hard to add all the new costumes online by September 1 to CosplayCostumeCloset.com. While we still have some costumes on SensualElegance.com, all the new styles, including childrens, are going to the costume site instead. The more adult costumes will only appear on Sensual Elegance since our costume site is designed to be child friendly.

We have so far completely added Leg Avenue and Incharacter Costumes and are working on those by Shirley of Hollywood and Coquette now with even more to follow. We are happy to say we will have a lot more mens and childrens costumes online this year! We are also adding a lot more accessories like hats, gloves, wigs, masks, and more.

We are doing inventory this week making sure it is totally accurate. We are also reorganizing the warehouse with more bins, better labels, more shelves, etc to make locating items faster.

We also have 2 part time employees waiting in the wings to help us with shipping and receiving once the rush begins.

As always though, shopping early for Halloween is always better, and to help with that we will be doing a store wide 20% off sale on CosplayCostumeCloset soon - watch for an announcement here and emailed to those who are registered for the mailing list. Our Halloween Tips newsletter will start up later this month too!

Rebecca is going on the road this weekend taking a bunch of stockings, costumes, and other items to Metrocon in Tampa, FL July 18-20. She will be sharing the Anime Pagoda booth so come out and say hello if you can!

Lori used to be the one to do shows, but that’s just going to be impossible any more as the office is too crazy. So Rebecca is taking on the road duties and may do more shows in the future - we are planning at least on Megacon, not sure yet what other shows we will be doing but they will be announced here as we figure it out.

One of the things we do at shows is discount overstock and returned merchandise as well as having a selection of stuff from most of our sites. It’s a great chance for you to get a deal (especially on shoes!) or see something in person instead of just on the web. Not to mention being able to say hi (and get a free gift if you mention the blog!).

Right now, we limit it to in state (Florida) shows, but may expand to the Southeastern US eventually.

Our office was without internet access most of today as our cable internet modem died. Took a while, but we finally got back online this evening about 7 pm.

As our sites are hosted off site, they were unaffected by the problem. Our apologies for the delay in responding to email and processing orders however. We will catch up by Sunday evening on both, modem permitting.

We wish everyone a happy and safe 4th of July. Our office will be closed today to allow everyone to spend time with family and friends and enjoy the Florida sunshine! Of course, there is no mail today either, so shipments that came in last night are going out tomorrow.

Enjoy the day!

All the discontinued styles of shoes have now been removed from all our sites. Of course, we have a TON of new styles to add, but at least the ones we can no longer get won’t confuse you!

We also need to go back and recheck color options on some styles as we’ve discovered a few seem to have discontinued some colors and added others. Not an easy thing to check as it’s more time consuming that checking styles! We will eventually get it all done (probably just in time for new catalogs to arrive )

We are thinking about adopting this as an office motto as it seems like several shipments right now should have been!

We have been awaiting several shipments for a while now: 1 from India, 2 from the UK, and 1 from Egypt. This is going down a bit - it was like 6 from the UK and 2 from Egypt for a while, so they are trickling in but not as fast as we would like.

Thank you to everyone who has given us feedback on the new communications system we are working on implementing - now just to figure out how to make it all work as automatically and smoothly as possible!

We have so far added an extra information box to your order history. You can log in at any time, click on “My Account” and then “Order Read more

We know one of our weakest points right now is customer communications and being more pro-active about it. The problem is the volume of orders we get has been growing steadily during the past 10 or so months and we haven’t been able to figure out a way to keep track with them all to get things going. Plus all the new vendor catalogs that have been coming in that we are trying to get added to the stores and other things that keep piling onto our “to do” lists is staggering. Read more