Worryingly I only stretched this image by 20% lol. James - Hero size.

BIG Delivery update all orders!

Plus info on inverts & fish too (ooo!)

And the BIG NEWS of what is coming in Summer 2024. You will love this! ❤

PLUS The BIG REVEAL - Summer 2024!

TRIPLE NEWS!

Part A - Delivery update all orders!

Hi everyone, some good news, I've nearly finished planning out all the deliveries for the next 12 days. I’ll be emailing or phoning each of you individually later this week/over the weekend to give you a more detailed update on your orders. I’ve got about 150 people to contact so it’s going to take me a while to get to all of you, don’t worry I will get to you though :)

I’m going to try and meet as many of you in person as possible over the next 12 days or so. Chances are that Tik Tok will be with me too so you’ll probably get to see him too!

Because of all the troubles over the last few months, rather than mass posting out, I think it'd be better to see as many of you as possible in person to say sorry for all the delays and thank all of you for your patience and continued support. I think currently there are around 150 people with live orders, and over the next 12 days I plan to personally hand deliver myself to about 90-110 of you.

I'm also expanding out the list of people that I let pop in store from just the usual dozen or so to around triple that number. This means that between hand deliveries and people popping in store I get to personally meet somewhere between 120 and 140 of the 150 people that currently have live orders.

My little boy Tik Tok. He’s much more cute than me ❤

A little something extra for each of you from me.

In every box that went out today I included an extra little coral frag for free for each of you, and I'll also be including some extra things in every single box that is posted out, hand delivered by me, or collected from store to make sure every one of you get an extra little coral or two of something nice as present from me to say sorry for the delays.

Inverts and fish - I will be short on them over the next 12 days.

While this will cover the vast majority of things currently on order, it may not cover all inverts and all fish. So where anyone has anything on order that we won't be able to easily complete I'm going to ring each of them over the next few days and see whether you want to swap any of those things for other things, take it as shop credit, have a refund on it etc. Where any items are unavailable, then if those items are over 28 days then if you swap them for something else I'll swap them for double the value of whatever you paid for the original items.

Inverts and fish - But, later this month I might not be!

Over the next 12 days I will be short on inverts and fish. I’m going to concentrate on getting all the corals sorted out first, because about 80% of people have only ordered corals, and most of the rest of you have mostly ordered corals. So rather than try and juggle lots of inverts between people as well as corals at the same time I’m going to focus on getting all the corals sorted first (mostly). I have some inverts here (not many) and a few more coming at the start and at the end of next week. So the situation may change between now and then depending on what is available etc.

I should have most coral orders sorted out by the time we get halfway through April, and I was planning to get a few corals in after that to sell as WYSIWYG’s in the 2nd half of April. However, we’ve had absolutely hundreds upon hundreds of different corals in over the last few months, and very few inverts, and almost no fish. Normally corals are around 92% of our trade these days, so you can see why getting more corals in is probably the sensible thing to do, but, being sensible isn’t really my forte (as you may have noticed lol).

Never knowingly sensible!

If I got more corals in I’d probably get more orders, but, I don’t do this job to just sell as much stuff as I can, I do it because it’s fun, and lately between trolls, cold weather, etc, it hasn’t been anywhere near as much fun as usual, so instead of doing the sensible (boring) option, for the 2nd half of April I’m just going to blow all the stock budget on cool stuff instead!

I’ve been keeping an eye on several big overseas wholesalers and they have got some properly cool things so what I’m going to is just order as many different weird things as I can because it’ll be fun! See “EXPECT WEIRDNESS"!” below.

Reselections - it is complicated!

I have a system for doing this so please wait for me to contact you, because until I get to your place in the list I won’t know the situation on your items. That might sound odd, but, this is why. It’s quite common with some types of items that there might be say 20 people that have ordered the same thing, but, the person that ordered the most of that item ordered more of them than everyone else put together, especially so with inverts.

A little while back for example we had a shortage of Halloween hermit crabs. I think we had about 6 people that had ordered 1, about 10 people that had bought a triple pack, and someone had bought 12, but, there was 1 person that had bought 60. So I contacted the person that ordered 60 and they were quite happy to have some of them as Halloweens, some as Bali Electric blue hermits, and some as Caribbean Red hermits. Because they helped out me (and everyone else too) by doing that, they also got 20 or so extra hermits of another few types too, extra shells for the hermits etc.

That then meant that all the other 18 people then all got their Halloween hermits. This is why it’s worth waiting for me to contact you, because the answer might be different by then, and if you happen to be the one that gets offered a reselection you might get a load of extra free stuff too for helping everyone else out.

It doesn’t just apply to people that have ordered a lot of something, sometimes even people with only 1 of an item might get a reselection offer, because their might be someone else that really really wants that specific colour or whatever to complete their collection. But, I have to do it in a very complicated system because it might be that the person that ordered say 60 Halloweens couldn’t reselect to Bali electric blue hermits unless someone that had ordered a lot of those chose to switch first!

So with 150 people that have ordered around 8,000 items in total, it is complicated, and especially so because if one person chooses to change then that might affect dozens of other orders with each change rippling out through many other orders! With most things it tends to be that either everyone ordered the same amount, or, 1 person ordered more than everyone else put together, which does simplify it a bit.

Refunds etc

I am still a bit behind on refunds at the moment, I'm going to concentrate on clearing up as many orders as possible over the next 12 days, and should just about be able to clear all the refunds up within that time too. If you do want a refund on anything just let me know, however, before you decide to do that, you might want to wait to see what else is coming. See “EXPECT WEIRDNESS!” below.

EXPECT WEIRDNESS!

Now although with a lot of this stuff I know the wholesaler has lots of them, and I could sell 10 of them say because they have several hundred in stock, I want to get as much variety of things as I can. But, with some of the really weird stuff they only have 1 of them in stock. So what I’m going to do is anything they have got loads of, or, they’ve been getting them in every week or two I’m going to put those online later today. But, there will only be very small numbers of each thing, and even where they have 500 I might only list a few, so if you do want any of the things that go online later today, make sure you grab them quick!

I’ll only be listing today stuff that they have a lot of, all the freaky one of a kind things (mostly also very expensive too) I won’t list until I know I’ve definitely got that. So I’ll add lots of different stuff to a special page later today and you’ll be able to order that stuff today, but, with the really rare things they won’t go online until later this month when I know for certain that I got the 1 they had.

Generally when I’ve done this kind of thing before most people snap up what they want as soon as they see something they want pop up online, but, there’s always a few people that want to wait until everything is online before deciding what to get.

Don’t miss out . . .

However, if you are thinking of doing that bear in mind that pretty much all the stuff that won’t be online until later in the month will be the rare, and therefore very expensive stuff. As a general guide the stuff that won’t be online until later this month will pretty much all be in the £150 to £1,000 plus price range, if you’re the kind of person that is happy to blow say £200 on a 1” shrimp, or £750 on a rare fish, then cool, but, if you’re not then don’t wait for that and end up missing out on something that goes online today at mostly more normal price ranges, as then you might miss out on getting something cool.

Even if you are someone that doesn’t mind splashing out on something you really want, also bear in mind that most of those inverts and fish are going to be really weird, most of the stuff going online later this month is likely to need either:

Very specialist care.
Maybe needs a tank to itself and cannot be kept with anything else.
It may require a huge tank of several thousand litres.
Or may be very expensive to look after. For example my pet Common Cuttlefish Susan would mostly only eat live fish. Now I can get Mollies and Chromis etc at trade price which helps a bit, but, if you were buying them from a shop then at around 8” long she was munching her way through around £700 a month at retail price in Mollies etc, and luckily she was female as a male Common Cuttlefish can be up to 8x that bodyweight and could probably cost £1,000 to £2,000 a month to feed. So when I say “may be very expensive to feed” bear in mind that an extra £3 a month on a second pack of frozen food a month is not going to cover it! One of my pet Panther groupers use to average 3 packs of frozen food a day on his own! 90 packs of frozen food a month for just 1 fish can make you very unpopular with the other half!

Is it online yet?!?!??

I’ll start popping stuff online later today and add some more things as some sell out etc. You’ll be able to see all this stuff by using the button below. Currently (6am Thursday 4th April) the page is blank, but, stuff will start popping up later this morning. I’ll add the button now though as otherwise I might forget to add it later!

Click here to see cool stuff!

Deliveries next week

Ok so I’m doing 3 huge hand delivery runs next week, they are big runs, some of them will be two day runs. It’ll be nice to be out of the shop for a change, and also it means the people coming in to do various things can get on with it without me getting in their way too, which will be a nice change for them lol!

The North Run will be up the A1 and the East cost to places such as Nottingham, Sheffield, Hull, and all the way up to Edinburgh, then across to Glasgow, down through Lancahsire, Manchester, a bit of North and East Wales, Birmingham, Cambridge and back to the shop (ish).

The South Run will be Suffolk, Essex, down the M11, round the East side of the M25, Southeast London, and the West side of Kent.

The West Run will be roughly Stevenage, Milton keynes, down into North London, along the M4 to Bristol etc, a short hop in the East side of South Wales, down into Devon , then to the South Coast, Bournemouth, Portsmouth, Worthing, up through Sussex etc, Southwest London, and then probably finishing up at my mate Rocky’s shop (& Kaz too) Crowder’s Aquatics, Bourdon (link below), and then back to the shop.

Busy little B . .

As well as doing the wholesale runs next week, all the fragging, packing I guess 120 ish polyboxes, and doing about 110 deliveries spread out over I guess probably well over 2,000 miles of driving, I’ll also be opening up at various points for collections next week, and posting stuff out too, on top of all my usual jobs, so I’ll be pretty busy! I don’t know which runs are which days yet, or, when I’ll be here for collections etc. I’ll probably just do 1 thing at a time, pick a run do that, then maybe open for some collections, maybe go out on another run, etc. I’ll play it by ear as I go depending on when I need to sleep, or have a break from driving etc. I’ll keep you all updated on Facebook etc.

Driving . . .

While I’m doing all of that driving and packing and all of that stuff I’m not going to be able to reply to the usual 50-200 emails a day, so a lot of the deliveries I’ll probably book by phone because the inbox will be so full so quickly I’ll have trouble finding anything. I’ll try to do as much as possible by phone or Whatsapp or something. If you do email next week then you’ll probably have to wait until the week after for a reply, because it’s probably a 140-150 hour week for me even without the usual 2-4 hours a day on answering emails etc.

Juggling

I try to juggle it around so that I get to most people either early morning, evening/night, or during the day if it’s a weekend day. I can also drop your box off at your work, a neighbour, etc if need be. We can work that out on the day, because trying to predict what time I finish packing, and traffic conditions etc in advance on routes that long is impossible really. Don’t worry I’ll find you (probably lol).

SUMMER 2024! - The BIG REVEAL!

I haven’t even got to the best bit yet, and that’s what will be happening in Summer 2024! Oh my!

But, quite frankly that’s already way too much excitement in one blog post, if I make it any more exciting you might all wee yourselves! I did twice while writing this bit, and I already knew what it is!

I’ll tell you about Summer 2024 over the weekend, in fact I’ll do it as live video as I haven’t done one for ages, and they’ll probably be lots of very excitable people wanting to ask lots of questions etc.

It is pretty epic, it’s by far the most exciting thing in my whole life and by a very long way too, and it’s not just exciting for me, because I think most of you* will be looking forward to it as much as me tbh!

What a summer this will be!

I’ll tell you more at the weekend ;)

James (& Tik Tok).

*There’s always at least one person that is not excited. I honestly wonder whether some people aim to be as boring as possible lol. Oh, talking of which long term fans may remember the spoof “Salty Revolution Bland Shop” I created in response to Johnny’s very long and dull complaint that the website is “too colourful”. Which was clearly clickbait.

I should have just left it really. As he was clearly just trying to bait me into it.

I rose to the bait obviously lol.

If I can find the graphic I’ll add it below.

James