The Custom ORder Process

Akado Armory is proud to provide our customers with the opportunity to order products that are built to their custom desires and designs. But any (honest) gear maker and retailer will tell you that custom orders are the hardest part of the business. First, we have to wait way too long for the gear to be made and then every little problem forces us to start from scratch.

We promise that we will always work hard to get you the custom products you want, made to be just right. We want to be transparent and honest with you at all times, and we need your understanding and grace throughout this process. If you’re not the type of person that likes to wait, or can’t deal with setbacks and delays, please don’t order custom items.

If you have any questions or want an update on your order at any time, just email:

Customs@AkadoArmory.com

 

The Wait

This is everyone’s biggest question when ordering custom items. “How long am I going to have to wait?”

Welp…like many things in life…there is an easy answer, and a correct answer.

The easy answer is that custom orders are often filled within 4-6 months from when they are placed. But sometimes they take longer.

All of our products are put through 2 rounds of QA. Once at the factory and once at our warehouse in the US. If your product arrives at the warehouse and fails QA, we have to start over again, so that 3-6 months instantly become 6-12 months. Add on top of that the shipping times from the factories to us can take at least a month or more. So that 12 months could be even longer.

Once we get your order placed for you, everything else is outside of our control.

So, the correct answer is that we don’t know exactly how long it’s going to take to fill your custom order. But we’re going to get it done as quickly as we can.

 

The Process

In order to help you understand better why it’s difficult for us to provide you with an accurate wait time, we thought it would be helpful to give you some insight into the process, how it is supposed to work, and where it often goes wrong.

Step 1. Your Order is Placed on AkadoAmory.com (Instant)

This is now the easy step. We have custom product builders up on the website to help you instantly build and place your order. We used to handle all of these orders by email. But we’ve left those dark ages behind.

 

Step2. Your Order is Placed in the Production Queue with our Vendor (0-2 Weeks)

When we receive your order, we prepare a production order for our vendors. We do these in batches so we can put a bunch of swords together. We typically send out batches of custom orders every other week.

 

Step 3. Your Custom Item is Manufactured and Goes Through QA1 (4-8 weeks)

This is the first step where things get a little less than certain on the timeline. When we place the production order with our vendor, your product enters the queue. How quickly it gets made is actually HIGHLY variable depending on how many products are ahead of you in line. This includes not only all of our other customs customers, but also all of our standard stock items and any prototyping work that is going on.

Production usually takes around 8 weeks, but there’s a lot of variability in this step. Once your item is completed, it goes through a QA process. If it fails the QA check then this step will need to start from scratch. You’ll be at the front of the production line, but it’s still a huge setback.

 

Step 4. Your Custom Waits for the Next Freight Shipment (2-8 Weeks)

If we shipped every item from our vendors individually, we would need to charge nearly double our current prices. One of the primary ways that we save you money is to batch our products together into large freight shipments. We get shipments together every couple of months, but the timing is less than consistent. If you place your order right as a shipment is going out, or it doesn’t quite make it through manufacturing in time to catch the boat, your product will need to wait for the next one.

 

Step 5. Your Product Travels Across the World (4 weeks)

Again, to save money, we largely use sea freight for our shipments. Boats are very slow things. Once your product actually makes it aboard a boat, it takes about a month to make the journey. But here we have another big pitfall: CUSTOMS ENFORCEMENT (dun dun dunnnn) and not just one helpful government agency, but two. If your shipment is held for “Further Inspection” either as it leaves the origin country or arrives in the US, that hold can last up to 45 days. We’ve even had it stopped both as it leaves and it arrives. Oh god, it’s so freaking painful and as we have seen certain countries politicians not being able to play nice with one another, we have seen a large increase in the number of shipments that get stopped.

 

Step 6. We Receive Your Product in the US and Perform QA2 (2 Weeks)

When we receive the shipment with your product, we have to break everything down and check everything for all of the products that we receive, which is usually a large amount. We complete checking everything in and QA within a couple of weeks. But this sometimes get slowed down if we are traveling to events or have other conflicts that slow the work on this step.

And here we get to probably one of the biggest risk hurdles. If your product fails QA at our warehouse in the US, we have to jump all the way back up to Step 3. This happens far more than we’d like, but we have standards that we want to uphold and it’s just part of doing business. When a custom item fails, you just have to start over.

Now, in this event we often try to find a reasonable path forward. If it’s a minor defect, we will give you opportunity to accept the item “as-is” at a reasonable discount. OR sometimes, if the QA failure is clearly the fault of the vendor, we can often get them to expedite and air ship the replacement. We’ll always do what we can here to make things right, but even in the best-case scenario, it’s a significant delay.

 

Step 7. We Ship Your Finished Product to You. (1 Week)

Once we have an acceptable item ready to go, we’ll ship it out to you. Depending on where in the world you live, this can take 1 day to 1 week usually. If the shipment is leaving the US again, we run the risk of Customs Enforcement involvement again at both ends, but this is far less likely for consumer level shipments.

 

The Good, the Average, and the Ugly

So, with all that said, here’s a good, average, and ugly scenario to give you the full sense of the scope of what we have seen play out in this process. Note that the ugly case is not the WORST case. We have had one or two that find even more interesting ways to go wrong. But this is a good idea of what to expect.