POSTAGE & PACKING UPDATE APRIL 2020

Who wants free delivery?

The answer to ‘who wants free delivery’ is EVERYONE. It's understandable, especially when some businesses have set the bar high with almost immediate delivery and no extra charge for postage and packing.

Like all online businesses, we're doing our best to get the goods to you as quickly and as safely as possible at a fair price. We can't always manage free, but as you'll see below, improvements are always on our mind.

No slouches

At Bubble Brothers, we've been sending wine deliveries around the country since you were knee-high to a grasshopper, or for donkeys' years—for ages, anyway. When it comes to putting orders together, organizing transport and handling all the associated paperwork, we're no slouches. However, it still takes even our highly experienced packing room staff(!) a bit of time to verify and record and pack and label and dispatch an order.

Drop box

We also invest in the super-sturdy packaging we use to ensure safe delivery of your wine orders. Wine is difficult to transport securely: it's a (sometimes pressurized) liquid in a glass container. Bottles are easy to break, messy when they do break, and more than liable to spoil their neighbours if they're shipped in the company of other bottles.

For this reason we put a good deal of thought and investment into our transit boxes, trying to strike the right balance between protection for the goods, sustainability of materials, and that old devil expense.

We don't charge for our transit boxes, but we hope you find creative ways to keep them going once they've arrived, whether that's recycling or reuse.

What's this about?

The reason for this post is to summarize some changes that we're making to our delivery arrangements. COVID-19 has affected the way we do business, and we have had to think from day to day about how to maintain the best possible service in the circumstances.

New delivery charges

We have sent very many bottles of delicious wine and champagne around the country in the last few weeks, and welcomed many new customers. Thank you to everyone who has chosen to buy from us. We hope you've enjoyed your choices and that we'll see you again!

We've been looking at the pattern of orders, and we're making some small changes to our postage & packing rates that will help us to keep the wine flowing with, we hope, minimal disruption to your shopping routine.

[UPDATE: further notice was given in due course and you can see our current delivery charges here.]From now on until further notice, our minimum order for free delivery is one hundred euro.

Orders of less than a hundred euro will attract a handling and delivery charge of ten euro, for nationwide delivery. Although the country's courier services are working flat out at the moment, most of our parcels are delivered on the next working day or on the working day after that. A tenner doesn't seem unreasonable.

A sustainable packaging option

We've used nearly all our existing stock of packaging in the last short while, so when it was time to re-order, we thought we'd try out something that caught our eye when it was brought to our attention in the course of last year. This is a 100% recyclable option, made from 100% recycled materials.

 

Not terribly exciting, perhaps, for those of you who don't spend much time thinking about wine packaging—but we do, and we are rather looking forward to receiving our first delivery in the days ahead.

Order soon and you may be one of the first to give the new boxes a test drive. In the meantime, you may like to read more about what led to the introduction of these extremely green transit boxes. Here's a blog post all about Pulpsafe and related matters from the managing director of our suppliers WBC, Andrew Wilson.

To make this whole box-nerd thing a little more exciting for, er, normal people, we're working on a plan to exchange your used (but clean and usable) packaging for some kind of discount when you return it to us. The pulp inserts that protect the bottles are stackable, and the double-ply outer boxes easily fold flat for storage. Watch this space.