Hello, friends! Our newest visiting animal, Clara Otter, made quite a splash at Hazel Village last week. Clara, her mini otter dolly, and her riverbank dress are still available, but the majority of her special doll clothing and accessories sold out extremely fast. This led to some understandable frustration, and many questions regarding our process for determining stock of these limited-edition products.

We wanted to take this opportunity to shed some light on the many factors that go into developing a Hazel Village collection. Let’s get into it!

Our products are handmade by skilled artisans who are paid fair wages. Since traditional handicraft techniques  require a level of craftsmanship that is undervalued in this era of mass production, they often get lost in many of today’s supply chains. Making items by hand takes much longer, but there’s so much love and care put into every step of the process. We are committed to these ethical production partnerships, as well as to sourcing high quality and sustainable materials for everything we make. 

When we’re planning a new collection, we decide on the quantity for each individual item by considering a number of factors: Which of our artisan partners have the skills and the capacity necessary to make it? What materials will be required? How long will it take to make? How much will it cost? What time of year will it be launching? How many people do we think might buy it? 

An artisan in Nepal prepares fibers for weaving by tying the ends of thread from their spools to the wooden wheel, making a bundle of 100, then winding it around and around to create the tension required for a hand-operated loom. She will then move over a couple of inches and repeat this process until the wheel is full of thread. This is just the first step in the traditional process of making cloth. It is labor-intensive and time-consuming, but the beautiful end result shows all the maker’s craftsmanship and care.

For some items, especially those which involve traditional handicraft techniques, there is a natural limit to how many we can make. For example, Clara Otter’s collection included three items – her Shell Pouch, Riverine Queen Crown, and Pearl Collecting Vest – that were handmade by some of our newer partners in Nepal. These items involved a large amount of hand-sewing, embroidery, and beadwork, and we ordered the absolute maximum amount that the artisans had the capacity to make.

When Clara’s collection launched, those three items were some of the most popular and the fastest to sell out. We are so  sorry that so many people missed out, but we are also excited to know that there are so many people who want to buy these special handicrafts. If you would like to learn more about the team who made these items, take a look at our blog post from Jane and Grace’s visit to Nepal earlier this year. 

As a small retail business, we have to be cautious and strategic when planning our collections. Predicting how many people might want to buy something is a very tricky part of our collection planning. We are lucky to have many enthusiastic customers who shop with us regularly, but despite this amazing support base and being able to take all our past experiences into account, this process inevitably involves a lot of guesswork. We work on a budget and when we make too many pieces of something, or when it just doesn’t sell as well as we had hoped,  it is both a financial burden and a waste of the time and materials required to make our products.

We’re determined to prioritize sustainability and avoid creating textile waste. This makes us very different from many other manufacturers, whose business models depend on over-ordering products with the knowledge that anything they don’t sell will likely end up in a landfill and won’t impact them financially, since their labor and material costs are so much cheaper. We try our best to find the balance between making enough that everyone who wants something should be able to get it, but not ordering so many that we will find ourselves with unsellable product.  

To tell you the truth, with most of the limited-edition collections we’ve released so far this year, we’ve erred a bit on the over-ordering side of the balance. Many items from those collections have been selling rather slowly, so we were quite surprised by how quickly Clara Otter’s collection sold out. Our previous limited-edition animal Augustus Wild Boar launched back in May, and we still have several items from his collection in stock – including his sandwich-making kit, which we think is one of the best things we’ve made this year. This just goes to show that we can only do so much to predict how an item might sell. 

So, all this is to say: sometimes things sell out fast because we didn’t make enough, and sometimes things sell out fast even though we made as many as we could! Naturally, the question that follows is:  “Will you restock this sold out thing?” And although we know this might be disappointing, the answer is usually no. Our products are limited-edition by nature. 

Right now our talented artisan partners are busy making products that are scheduled to launch later this year, and do not have the capacity to make more of any of Clara Otter’s  clothing items without interfering with our entire production plan for the next 6+ months. By the time we would have the capacity to make more of these products, it would be interfering with production in 2025. We have so many exciting designs in the works that we cannot wait to share with you, and we don’t want to sacrifice them in order to restock a collection. 

Another question we sometimes see is: “Why not do a pre-order?” Some of you have commented that you would be happy to wait even up to a year if you could pre-order things. While we deeply appreciate your patience and dedication, the fact is that most of our customers would not be willing to wait 6-12 months to receive their order. There are minimum requirements that must be met when purchasing materials and placing orders with our manufacturers, so we do not even have the ability to make a small batch just for the people who are willing to wait. Pre-orders bring along their own set of logistical complications on the backend as well – our business model just isn’t set up to accommodate them. Perhaps someday that may change, but for now we appreciate your understanding. 

While we can never guarantee that limited-edition products won’t sell out quickly, the good news is that it really doesn’t happen all that often anymore. Only a few years ago, we were making smaller quantities and we did see more frequent quick sell-outs. But over the past year or two, we have done our best to scale up production and make our limited-edition products less scarce. We also have systems in place to keep our launches as fair as possible: we set purchase limits to help prevent individuals from buying up more than their fair share and we keep waitlists for sold-out products to make sure we can sell any extras to folks who missed out. Still, we always recommend setting your alarms and shopping at launch time if you can. 

We hope you’ll remember that the limited-edition nature of our products is what allows us to make so many special things, employ so many skilled artisans, and foster the creation of so many traditional handicrafts.

In these unpredictable times when the seas of small business are so difficult to navigate, we feel incredibly lucky to be where we are. We see other makers and small businesses in our industry closing up shop with saddening regularity, and we are very aware that if the tides were to change and people stopped wanting to buy handmade stuffed animals wearing elaborate garments, that could be us. Hazel Village has grown into the going concern we are today because of your support, and we are so incredibly grateful. 

From the bottom of our hearts, thank you for helping to make our woodland animal dreams come true!

You may also like:

A Trip to India & Nepal: Behind the Scenes of Ethical Production 

Journey of a Bat: the Making of a Limited-Edition Animal

Meet San! Behind the Scenes of our Cambodia Production

Feel free to email us any questions at hello@hazelvillage.com!