The 2019 End of year review!

Hi OGO sellers,

It's almost the new year (and the start of the 2020s!). Cue the 2019 reflections.

In the spirit of full transparency, we’d like to recap all of the issues we’ve had leading up to the Christmas period. We'll also touch on what we are doing to make things (much) smoother in the future.

This will be quite a long email, so those who don’t wish to read the whole post here's the TL:dr (aka summary):

We spent most of 2019 making substantial investments in our production facilities to bring us to a world-class level. However, due to a variety of reasons, including shipping delays and vendor software issues, we didn’t manage to bring these new significant investments entirely online in time for Christmas.

As some of you know, we’ve been searching for pioneering print technology to continue to support your brand. The search has been a long road where we’ve extensively trialled every brand of cutting-edge digital printer on the market - usually left with less than satisfactory the results.

Early this year, we travelled around the world testing hardware and finally came across a stand-out DTG (direct-to-garment) printer that stood head and shoulders above the rest.

Our long search came to an end when OGO signed the papers on the Aeoon DTG printer - the very FIRST IN AUSTRALIA!

The Aeoon DTG is a printing platform that truly brings OGO and all of you into the next decade of apparel printing with incredible advancements in print quality & application.



We were initially planned to have the Aeoon online in October. But, due to shipping delays (shipping a 1-tonne machine from Austria has challenges!), as well as programming delays, this didn't happen. Several OGO stores and orders were gradually transitioned over to the Aeoon in November. OGO plans to have all stores taking advantage of the Aeoon by mid-January, 2020.

What does this mean for you? A variety of new features, some never seen before in Australia, are on the way! Among these:

• Better quality printing
• Best-in-class washability
• Rollouts of larger print areas
• Neck label printing/branding
  and reduction of production times!

Now let's talk about where we went wrong this Christmas season. We had quite a few things go wrong this Christmas, frustratingly unrelated issues.

• We had a bad batch of ink - that resulted in some washability problems - we believe we caught the majority of these before they went out with our internal testing, but there is a possibility a few got through.
   
• Some artwork that wasn't clean (mostly having messy semi-transparent pixels) appeared more significant when printed than sometimes was intended by you guys.
   
• Some back prints were missing off shirts.
   
• Shipping info, tracking numbers and order statuses haven't been updating correctly to Shopify orders.

With the last three issues, there was due to a software vendor we've been using as part of our production systems. For a global system that ships somewhere in the realm of 100,000 packages a day, we didn't think such random rudimentary problems were possible. Random being the key as to how it managed to slip through our testing processes.

We've realised after this, for yours and our sakes, we can't afford to lose visibility and more importantly, control of our systems.

So, moving forward, we've doubled our focus and investment in our in-house development team to remove all external software vendors possible from our core production systems (as we have done in the past). We'll also be providing you guys with more transparency and visibility of your order's progress.

There have been some hard lessons for us, but we are committed to getting back on track by mid-January - we expect shipping tracking info to be fixed, as well as production times back to our standard, pre-Christmas timeframes.

The OGO team continue to work with vigour and, thanks to amazing sellers like yourself, - continual motivation to improve!  We've been on-site throughout this entire Christmas period - including Christmas Day!! So rest assured, we are working our hardest to get everything running smoothly.

If you have any issues, as always, please reach out and let us know!

Thank you all again for your understanding and patience during this period. Have a safe and Happy New Year!

Thank you from Zhen and the OGO POD team!