And Relax. Promotional USB Stick Supply Returns to Normal
Now that the Chinese National Holiday and Golden week is over our factory is open again – hooray!
Whilst it’s not quite business as normal it’s pretty close so we can once again breathe a little easier, change out of our brown trousers and remove our bicycle clips! It’s always a challenging time when systems that work flawlessly for most of the year get interrupted by a mass holiday that lasts more than 1 or 2 days. Unfortunately in the case of these “national holidays” it’s not just the factory that closes but pretty much the whole country. It’s analogous to our Christmas and New Year week when pretty much nothing happens apart from families getting back together.
The staff are back and working hard to clear the backlog that any break of more than a couple of days inevitably creates. Thanks to their efforts the lead times on orders of promotional USB memory sticks are now back to days rather than weeks but we do have the capability in the UK to assemble, print, engrave, data-load and deliver USB sticks in as little as 24hrs – ideal if you’re in a hurry. It’s not the full range of products but we do have around 20 different designs in a range of memory sizes that we can offer on our next day service.
Fortunately the next holiday is several months away so hopefully we can now enjoy an extended period of calm and normality – that is unless the Bardarbunga volcano in Iceland decides to misbehave and erupt and bring chaos to international travel and cargo flights (fingers crossed).
The one remaining negative is the weakness of the pound (GBP) against the $ (USD) – over the last couple of days it’s drifted between $1.59 - $1.61, a fall of just over 6% from its peak of $1.70 just a few weeks ago. With all USB sticks being purchased from the factories in China in dollars any weakness in the pound against the dollar is directly reflected in the unit cost that end customers pay. It’s this price volatility that prevents most suppliers (including ourselves) from publishing prices on their websites.
In an ideal world we’d have some certainty on prices looking forward for a couple of months because this would allow us to fix our prices and actively promote them to our customers but unfortunately that’s not the world we operate in.
To get the latest prices on any of our promotional USB memory sticks just call us or fill out the enquiry form on our website – one of our team will get back to you (normally within the hour) with prices and lead times and if you’ve got your artwork ready we’ll work up some examples for you (free of charge).
USB2U - and relax