Niqkita's Sock Journal

Large scale ordering is quite honestly one of my favorite things in life and has been for the past 16 years since I first starting getting to order for various sections at Trader Joe’s in southern California. The whole flow of it all fascinates me, some things a case/dozen of is plenty, other things two, some five to ten, some you order every single order even if there seems to be plenty when you write the orders and you have to figure out day to day, week to week which is which, and of course there are fluctuations that make some of the predictions impossible.
The past few weeks my biggest problem has been making the time to place my orders. I have a routine that allows me to write my orders throughout the day so they are ready to go when I make the call or write out the fax, but I like to have as many orders pulled as possible so that I am sure of what we need so I keep running out of time & steam before I put in the orders. Some suppliers are easier to deal with than others, some ship faster, some slower, some run out of stuff constantly, others stock stuff fairly reliably. EG Smith is among my favorites, my contact there is fun to talk to and they are fairly reliable with their stock…
Now we get to my photo above, Space dyed tights layered under Pippy Longstocklings A perfect combination to wear with shorts or a skirt on a chilly day. Their tights have been selling astoundingly well this month and their orders have been taking a couple of weeks longer than usual to arrive so we’re out of a few even though we just got an order last week. In the picture I’m wearing Mercury rising, we’re out of them but have more coming, my fav of the space dyed is the fuchsia shock mars, I just found out yesterday they are gone forever ~:( The longstocklings have been in and out of stock for the past several months despite always having at least 60 pairs on backorder with them. Right now we’re really well stocked on the black ones with a few dozen in white left and many more due in shortly.
If you’ve been reading my journal over the years you may know that the Pippys have been a major item for us since the first year. It was also the last year EG offered them to the US til this year. They offer a much longer version to Japan, but I’ve yet to convince them to sell us any. When I put in the order yesterday I walked room to room as I talked to Nancy so that I could get a visual of each item as we went and placed a really large order. As sales stabilize we’ll be able to stay better stocked.
I’ll try to make a little extra effort this week to show you more of the things we actually have in stock, the madness should be slowing down any day now…

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 17th, 2005 at 7:29 am and is filed under socks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.