This week is shaping up to be one of our most exciting weeks ever on the farm, both personally and professionally. After years of holding out for a miracle, we are over-the-moon to be welcoming our adopted baby into the world any day now. We can't wait to introduce you to the newest member of the Grace Rose Farm family.
At the same time, we're exploring new and exciting ways to continue bringing our roses to you.
We are so deeply sorry to those affected by our orders being delayed these past few weeks. NOTHING is more upsetting to us than knowing the roses we so lovingly grew died in a box. It is heartbreaking. Once our boxes started getting delayed before Mother’s Day, we were flooded with thousands of emails. Our small customer service team was overwhelmed, and have been working around the clock to get back to everyone!
We had done everything possible to prepare for Mother’s Day week (to put it in perspective, it wasn't much more volume than we did last October during our busiest wedding week). We had the roses, the supplies, the coolers, and the staff. We ship perishables overnight and there is zero room for error. With the high volume of shipping happening due to the pandemic, shipments simply got so behind that priority overnight boxes even going within California were taking 3 days to arrive. Our beautiful roses were arriving wilted and dead having spent days in hot cargo trucks. Utterly heartbreaking.
These past two weeks have forced us to examine our business model, as well as our goals for our work/life balance. The good news is that we've been exploring some incredibly exciting opportunities to bring our roses to you in new ways, through education, rose bush sales, an expanded product line and more!
For now, we are offering cut roses via shipping on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays and will have two products available, our Rosey Posey and Classic Bouquet, both in farmer’s choice of beautiful colors. We will be shipping a very limited number of orders every week. The Santa Barbara airport can only take a limited amount of packages from us each day, so by limiting our orders, we will be able to have more control over our shipments. Simplifying our operation is essential for our growth and making our roses exclusive will provide us with time to focus on exciting new ventures.
We hope you'll continue following along on our journey. We cannot tell you how much we appreciate the love, understanding and support you've shown us this past month. We really needed your grace, and you delivered.
xoxo
Gracie and Ryan
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