No one likes to wait and the advent of ecommerce does not help with the situation at all. With so many businesses offering overnight deliveries the expectations of consumers are high - as they should be! While 90% of DeVogue orders are dispatched and received within 3 days of ordering, the 10% orders may take up to 10 days to delivery. 

We, as a brand, take full responsibility for the customer service experience we provide. We hold ourselves to a very high standard, in every regard, and we deeply appreciate that our customers expect such high standard from us as well. This blog will help you understand what is happening behind the curtain and what may be causing delay in your order's delivery.

1: Lean Manufacturing

DeVogue is not only a retailer of leather footwear but also a manufacturer. What that means is that raw leather enters our manufacturing unit and a finished shoe leaves it. Not only that, we are a lean manufacturing company, this started off as a necessity when we first started but now it has become a part of our identity. 

But why does it matter? It matters because as a lean organization we keep low levels of inventory (to pass on the savings to our customers in shape of low prices), the details of this can be discussed in a separate blog post on operational efficiency but the take away is that due to lean inventory we sometimes do not adjust quickly to uncertainties and changes (and there are a lot of them in Pakistan!)

2: Leather Shortage

Leather shortage is one such uncertainty. The winter season is peak season when it comes to footwear sales, but unfortunately this is also the season when leather is in shortage. So on one hand you have high demand while on the other hand you have short supply! A recipe for perfect disaster. 

3: Refused Orders and Fake Orders

As most of our orders are cash on delivery (COD) there is no way of confirming if any order is genuine or not. If I were to tell you the number of refused and fake orders we receive you wouldn't believe it, but trust me when I tell you that it is in double digits. 

Why does it matter? On average it takes 7-10 days for a parcel to return if the customer refuse to accept it. So we have to wait for 7-10 days for the parcel to get back to us before we can ship it out to the new customer. 

4: Replacements

As a matter of policy, we ALWAYS ship out the replacements before fulfilling the new orders. So let me explain this with an example.

Lets say Customer 1 ordered 4001-Black in size 8 and Customer 2 ordered 4001-Black in size 9. Customer 1 gets his parcel but now he wants to replace it and get size 9, we would first send him the replacement before fulfilling Customer 2 order. It is our belief that customer service and warranty has highest priority but unfortunately that also means that Customer 2 may have to wait for a few days! 

Solution?

Now I know you must be thinking there is a simple solution to this, just increase the inventory levels but it is not that simple and let explain why:

1: Our manufacturing unit operates at 100% capacity all around the year. So in current situation we cannot increase the production even if we try, but at the same time we are always upgrading and growing our capacity so hopefully the problem will be solved in overtime. 

2: In short term why don't we buy from other suppliers? Sure that is an option but anything close to DeVogue's quality cost more than Rs5000 even in wholesale price (and we retail for that much!). So that pretty much defeats our business model (more on that later).

Conclusion

At DeVogue we try to live by the motto of affordable quality and quality here not only means the quality of product but also the quality of processes and procedures we apply in our business practices. 

So in conclusion, we here at DeVogue are working tirelessly to provide you with affordable quality and while there may be challenges along the way, we are well equipped to handle them. While there may growing pains as discussed above we will always be improving our processes without compromising on our ideals.