This week on What's Up Wednesday, a look at the record setting week of Balloon Fiesta, what that means for shopping in the next couple of weeks, and an item that made is just as Balloon Fiesta was starting. And a warm welcome to the hundreds of you reading What's Up Wednesday for the first time! We hope you enjoy it and find it useful.
WOW what a week! Great weather, Super crowds and incredible sales. So many sales that even with our increased staffing, we fell behind on processing orders. Even the post office had to send a special truck for pickup of processed orders, which delayed some shipping by a couple of days. We're catching up now and should have everything out the door or ready for pickup by the end of the week. Thanks for your patience.
Speaking of orders and product demand, let's take a look at the Eclipse and Marvin the Martian pins. Demand for these two items alone was way higher than we anticipated. When they first went on sale, we immediately recognized the need to order more and we did. But the demand soared even higher causing us to limit orders to allow everyone on every day to have a chance to purchase one.
It was also an effort to prevent folks from buying out our stock and then selling the pins for extortion level prices on other sites. At mid-week we added the ability to preorder additional quantities of both the Eclipse and Marvin pins. You'll be able to place an order for those pins through October 22. At that time we'll place an order for all these preorders and we expect to have them in hand at the end of November for delivery in early December. Note that if you order other items with your pin preorder, we'll hold on to the entire order until the pins arrive. If you'd like the other items earlier, please separate your order into separate orders.
That brings us to the rest of the inventory. If you've been reading What's Up Wednesday for awhile, you know that most of our items are dated. And we split up our inventory to stock the different tents and locations around the field during the event. Some of those locations sell out of certain items, others do not. Now that the event is over, we will be consolidating all that inventory back into the physical gift shop and our online inventory. We plan to have our remaining pin stock back online by the end of the week, with clothing to follow next week. So keep an eye on the site to see items restocked as we consolidate that inventory.
Speaking of pins available online, our Balloon Fiesta Live! announcers Glen Moyer and Art Lloyd Jr, always have pins to trade with pilots, crew and guests on the field. In order to make them available to those who could not attend, they have given us a number of their announcer pins and Balloon Fiesta Live! pins to offer for sale. The announcer pins, red for Art and blue for Glen, feature their silhouette, and the alien balloon. The Balloon Fiesta Live! pin has the BFLive! logo and the spaceship balloon. All in reference to year number 51 and the "link" to Area 51. These pins will only be available online and only a limited number remain.
Next week on What's Up Wednesday, we'll take a closer look at what items are still available and share a little more information on this recording setting Balloon Fiesta!