This was a tough call, but sadly as of Sunday 13 March we've taken the decision to stop shipping to Europe.

 

Hopefully this will be a temporary thing.

 

Massive apologies firstly to all our regular and loyal customers throughout Europe.

The reality is that since Brexit, it's now easier to send a parcel to Australia or Hong Kong than it is to send it a few miles across the Channel.

New regulations around the collection of VAT have made things doubly complicated for small businesses like ours, and every order now requires a bunch of complicated paperwork and general buffoonery.

More importantly than any of that is the impact on our customers. The sheer volume of extra admin required for everyone involved seems to have the knock-on effect of making everything massively delayed.

Almost every order we have despatched recently has arrived way later than we would like. All have required chasing - hours spent dealing with customs officials, trying to communicate with different shipping companies in different languages and all the stuff every one of us hates. We've been using Google Translate a lot.

The upshot is this - we'll go away and see if we can re-think how we do the whole European delivery thing. As soon as we have a sensible solution, we'll let you know. Please bear with us while we get it sorted. Hopefully you all understand.

March 14, 2022 — Rory Batho