Proforma Invoices

Lots of proforma invoices have been crossing my desk recently. That's great news because a proforma invoice is usually soon followed by a real invoice. And the real invoices are sent when goods are shipped. So this means that lot's of stuff is due to be shipped to us in the next few weeks. And we could sure use more stuff!

If you've been shopping at our site you may know that we are out of too many items. As I've mentioned before, we've had a great winter. Except for a couple of weeks after Christmas, there was no slowdown of the sort many bike shops expect in winter. In fact VO's business has almost doubled since last year. Thank you! But the bad part of this is that because we must place orders with factories 3 to 6 months ahead of time and because we hadn't anticipated the increase in sales, we are really low on inventory. That's not a good position to be in during the even busier Spring season.

In other news, we are starting to get quotes and samples of products we requested in Taiwan. At last count we were looking at over 80 new products. I just approved production of one of the new chain guards. The rackaleur is now in prototype stage. Stainless steel decaleurs, porteur racks and rear constructeur racks are about to go into production in a new factory (the samples look terrific). Then there are the frames; I'll have a post about them soon. As always, it's busy at VO.