Despatch from St. Fagans Road
Everything goes out of the same room it was measured in. There are two outer packs, two post days and one return address, and none of them changes with the size of the order.
01One bench, two jobs
The bench is used for measuring in the morning and for packing on the days parcels go. That is a small-office arrangement rather than a virtue, and it has one consequence worth knowing: a unit is measured, folded and labelled in the same session, so the figure on the card and the piece in the parcel cannot drift apart between one desk and another.
Cloth is kept off the bench while a parcel is being made up. Pieces live folded on a shelf in paper, and only the unit going out comes down.
02Packing a small run
Three things go into every parcel and nothing else goes in.
- The piece, folded to fit the pack it is going in, with the fold made along the length rather than across a hem.
- A measurement slip — the line name, the recorded width and length, the tolerance, and the date the unit in your hands was last measured. It is the card, written for the piece you have rather than the run.
- A return slip with the office address already on it, so a return needs no correspondence first.
No printed catalogue goes in, because the list changes as runs finish and a sheet of paper would be out of date before it was read. There is nothing in the parcel to throw away but the wrapping, which is paper and board.
03The two packs, measured
Both packs are measured like everything else here, outside dimension, so you can tell before ordering whether a parcel will go through your door.
04Tuesday and Friday
Orders in hand are packed on Tuesday and on Friday and walked to the Post Office counter the same afternoon. Nothing is collected from here, which is why the days are fixed: one person carries the parcels, and two trips a week is what that person can do without the measuring stopping.
The tracking number goes out by email when the parcels are handed over, not when the label is printed. An order placed after the Friday run waits for Tuesday, and the confirmation says which run it is on rather than leaving you to work it out from a calendar.
If a unit turns out short-measured when it comes down off the shelf, it is held back and you get an email naming the figure it measured. A piece that misses its own printed tolerance does not go in a parcel on the grounds that it is only a few millimetres.
05How a return comes back
A piece comes back to the address it came from, with the return slip that was in the parcel. Tell me first if you can — an email saves the postage when the answer is a measurement you could have had instead — but a return needs no permission and no number from me.
Send it back unwashed. A washed piece cannot be measured against the record any more, because the record is the figure after one wash at the label temperature, and a second wash puts the piece outside the thing it would be checked against.
When it arrives it goes on the bench and is measured again. The figure joins that line’s record whatever it says, which is how a run gets its spread corrected after the fact. Then the refund goes back by the way the order was paid, and it includes the postage out. None of this cuts down the rights the distance-selling rules give you; where they say more than this page does, they win.
06Asking before you buy
The cheapest parcel is the one that never has to come back. Write to sales@shaidirect.shop with the measurement you are working to and the line you have in mind, and the reply will carry the figure off the actual unit. The comparator on the opening page and the convention on the measuring page are there for the same reason.