Some progress

Blog entry for November 2022

Well, there is some positive news... There have been a number of minor improvements over the last few months, and now we are at last able to ship to Canada again! (All shipping to Canada was suspended for about a year, so we have a backlog of customer requests to sort out.) There are still many restrictions in place, and it varies wildly from country to country, but we hope that from now on things will gradually get better and better.

Meanwhile there are a few problems. We are experiencing some fairly wild currency fluctuations: the good news is that the yen is falling against most currencies, but the bad news is that this is going to lead to price rises. In particular, Tenyo...

Tenyo price increases - end November

Tenyo increased the prices for almost all puzzles by around 5-10% on the first of September. Using our existing stock, we have been able to hold our existing prices until now, but by the end of this month we will need to update to the new prices. "You have been warned!"

Countries with restricted shipping

Although things are generally getting better, many countries still have very limited shipping options: in particular, Canada, the UK, and the US. Typically these have only express (EMS: fast and expensive) or surface parcel. So for urgent orders there is no big problem, but if you are looking for economy, surface shipping is very slow (around 2 months to UK or Canada; around 3 months to US), and moreover it is only economical for larger puzzles. Many of our regular customers have settled on making large order just occasionally, such as a minimum of four or five 1000-piece puzzles.

Some other countries (particularly in Europe) are only accepting surface mail, so there are no fast services at all. I'm afraid there is nothing we can do about this, other than ask for your patience. In some cases there is also the possibility of express shipping by Yamato (corresponding to UPS in many cases); this is typically fast and expensive, but erratically priced (by shape!), making larger orders sometimes cost competitive with EMS. You will need to ask about the cost for this: we cannot calculate it automatically, because it depends on the dimensions, not the weight.