August 10, 2021 - Helping us help you!
We've focused our efforts entirely online, which has enabled us to more readily meet the immediate and long-term needs of Parishes and Clergy. When our time was split between visits and walk-throughs yet also having to maintain the critical work necessary, it wasn't practical. As our workload increased, that split became far more detrimental than helpful -- not only to us, but more importantly to serving all our customers consistently and meaningfully. Once covid hit the pause button, we reevaluated how best to serve our community while cutting unnecessary costs both of time and money. And now things are somewhat back to normal, we are still consistently yet happily engulfed in projects, and would like to address a few important points to help both existing and newer customers.
- Items are sold on a first serve basis, and we're unable to hold items for more than a few days. Even if something is put temporarily on hold, there is no guarantee it won't get sold. We have a varied and extensive workload, and as much as we'd like to hold items, its not feasible.
- While we are typically prompt with responding to email requests and inquiries, please be patient if you don't hear back right away. And feel free to email again if in a few business days you haven't had a response (check that spam folder too first!). We never mind followups... on the contrary we appreciate it very much -- sometimes items are missed as we go through hundreds of emails each week.
- Our workload is intense, very intense. However we're a family-owned business with only a couple hands managing every mission-critical aspect. I bring this up to give weight and clarity to the prior points, since much of our workload is not obvious yet necessary and quite demanding. Our list of priority duties include:
- Email correspondence and followups, we receive over 300 emails per week just to start.
- Organizing, fixing, cleaning, maintaining, sizing, photographing, listing, packing and shipping items.
- Administration of our LAN, computer hardware and software.
- Website creation and maintenance, standards compliance, hosting, cms and applications, backups and testing.
- Invoicing, billing, record keeping.
Each of those five bullet points is a career and full-time job position currently handled by two individuals. In addition, our site reaches 3,000,000 search hits and 12,000 unique visitors every month, so there's no lack of important work needing done 24/7. While this is often overwhelming, we genuinely enjoy the work, appreciate the customer camaraderie, and are honored to help restore the almost-lost historical beauty and craftsmanship once commonplace And we can't thank you enough! This wouldn't be possible without our Priests, Nuns, Brothers and Sisters who reach out to us -- we're absolutely happy to help.