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To all of our long-time fans, collectors and our new friends and followers, we thank you for your continued support!
If you have chosen to bring Bella Notte into your homes, know that we are so honored each time that you do.
To continue to provide you with the best experience on top of our products themselves, we have acknowledged our need to address a few topics. First of all, allow us to apologize if we have caused any additional stress about an order placed within the last 7 months — the last thing we would ever want is to make building your home sanctuary a stressful event.
If you have placed an order with us for made to order products, you may have been impacted by our extended lead times. Our (already) small team has been impacted in a big way this year. In our attempts to remain hopeful about being able to return to pre-COVID working conditions, our communication strategy has been lacking. Our promise is to do better for you — after all, you are why we are Bella Notte Linens.
After careful internal review, we have confirmed that 70% of orders ship in 6 weeks or fewer and while that only leaves a minority of orders taking longer, we have made the decision to update our lead time for made to order products to 8 weeks.
Why update our lead times across the board for the 30% of orders which take longer than 6 weeks to ship?
Because each and every single order is important and handled with the same level of care and attention. We hope you understand that this decision was not made in haste.
Allow us to set the stage: it’s March 16th (2020) and upper management calls an all-staff meeting to notify our teams that starting March 17th we are closed until further notice as our county is under a Shelter-in-Place order. HQ is closed for at least the next 2 weeks and they’ll stay in touch with updates about when we can come back.
In early April, we started allowing for small teams of family members to go to HQ on a rotating basis to all-hands-on-deck do whatever possible to ship orders which were packed and ready to go, pack up orders which were complete but not yet packed and pull any orders we could fulfil from our Renewal collection. Bella Notte owners were packing orders for our Director of Operations to process for shipping. As we realized that small teams could safely return to the warehouse, we welcomed the husband and wife team who were able to pick up where production and Quality Control left off. Slowly, we were able to bring more and more of our production staff back while maintaining safety protocols such as team members taking their temperature upon arrival, wearing face coverings at all times when social distancing is not possible and taking additional time to clean all shared surfaces as needed.
All the while, our Customer Support and back office teams were working a hybrid of in-person and remotely. It felt like we were in hyper-speed and slow-motion at the same time: Do we launch new products or do we hold off? Are we being tone deaf with our messaging during a global pandemic? What day is it? Can you hear my child in the background?
Teams aside, at an even broader scale, ownership and operations have their own questions to answer: what’s happening in the Flax fields? How are our vendors doing in other countries? When will our fabric shipments be processed at port?
Our small, family-run business is doing our absolute best every single day to produce the products we are known for and to delight our customers. In order to do that, we need time: time to receive our fabrics, time to produce our products and time to get back to every single message we receive from our customers. If you feel we have fallen short, we understand and we apologize. To restate the promise we are making — we promise to do better.
We await the time when we can provide an update when our lead times are officially reduced. Until then we remain grateful for all of our customers, but it’s not about us. If you’re reading this…...we thank you!
The Entire Bella Notte Team & Family
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