SBG Sword Store Blog

As you know, it’s officially less than 24 hours before we close up for the year. It doesn’t mean that we stop working entirely, indeed we will still be on board for the week leading up to Christmas to get orders out as fast as possible and we may have a last minute surprise or two.

So as is often the case with SBG we don’t ever really take a ‘switch off all the lights and go home’ style holiday..

But just before we finish up for 2020 – there is one last addition I have been pushing for for over 2 years now for the Ryujin Custom Katana line..

BLACK ITO WITH BLACK RAYSKIN!!

Yes, that’s right – one of my favorite historical tsuka ‘color’ combinations, black ito over black rayskin is now available to use to make a dark themed Katana (or iaito)!

It’s only available on the Katana and the iaito series at the moment, but it opens up some very cool design opportunities and I for one am very excited to see it added to the line up!

From Sunday the 20th of December to Monday the 11th of January 2021 the SBG Sword Store will be officially on vacation.

By officially on vacation, what this really means is that we will still have a skeleton crew working and I will also be checking in every few days to make sure nothing too urgent has popped up – otherwise I will be using the time for working on other aspects of the site (there is always so much needed to be done at SBG, there really is no time for a totally ‘unplugged’ holiday – not that I mind that much. I love what I do!).

Anyway, as we get closer to Christmas we are already seeing an increase in shipping damage and rough handling, so if you have not got your Christmas sword shopping sorted yet – time is up, you need do something about it now before it is too late..

As we get closer to the official store holiday period I may dig up a few specials specifically designed to ship fast in time for Christmas for anyone who has indeed left it to the last minute.

Anyway, hope you have some holidays coming to you soon – here’s hoping 2021 will be a better year than this one.. (would not be hard!).

Seasons Greetings,

• Paul Southren

“It must be 2020” so I have heard many times when describing something that goes totally awry.. And that very much applies to the aftermath of orders from over the Black Friday/Cyber Monday sales period..

For a start, all of the warehouses we depend upon for shipping are short staffed due to Covid restrictions. At the same time, with many new orders to process, a critical piece of software we use decided to add to the chaos by crashing (and remains crashed as techs work on it).

And to make it a ‘perfect storm’ and top it all off in a way that is ‘so very 2020’, a key staff member who processes new orders was suddenly struck down with a virus (not Covid, thankfully – but it took her out of commission at the worst possible time and she is only now getting back in the saddle).

Add all of these factors together, and you have quite a bottleneck – especially after so many people took advantage of the huge savings on offer over the sales event weekend.

To this end, we are all doing everything humanly possible to get any and all outstanding and unshipped orders out without too much of a delay – but please be aware that due to the fantastic run of bad luck we have just had, delays ARE to be expected. But please rest assured, we are on the case and everything should be caught up by early next week at the latest..

Thanks for bearing with us!