A family ordering for a wedding, from five different overseas shops, with a date that could not move.
The risk in a job like this is not the shipping, it is the sellers. Five orders means five chances of a delay, and the whole shipment can only leave when the last parcel arrives. So we worked backwards from the date: everything had to be at our warehouse four weeks before the wedding, which meant every order had to be placed six weeks before, which meant the decisions had to be made seven.
Four sellers were on time. The fifth, a fabric seller, went quiet for nine days, and we told the family on the third rather than hoping. They ordered the same fabric from a second seller as insurance, at a cost of about six hundred rufiyaa, and it turned out to be needed.
Everything flew as one box, cleared in two days and was collected eighteen days before the wedding. The spare fabric was used for the tables.
We tell this one to every customer with a date. The insurance order is nearly always worth it.
