A few words about Papertrey

One of the goals I've had for this blog is to keep it completely drama-free, and I'd like to continue that, but because I've ordered and used so much product from Papertrey Ink in the past, I want to say a little bit about the firestorm that's blown up around them in recent days.

I haven't been involved in the forum discussions or other drama that's come up lately regarding their customer service, so if you're interested in details of what's happened recently, you can catch up with some excellently written blog posts about it here, here, and here.

As for me, the main reason I haven't been involved in the discussions is the same reason that you've been seeing more and more product from other companies on my blog lately. I was fairly irritated when I discovered that Papertrey had discontinued all of their inks due to problems, but had only posted that info on the Ink section of the site - no recall emails (even though they send out frequent emails to their customer base), no blog posts on Nichole's blog or those of any of the design team (which I have in my RSS reader, so I see them daily) - just one mention, buried in the site, which I didn't see until after the time had passed to be able to get a refund for the defective inks I already had.

I decided to give PTI the benefit of the doubt on that, and give them credit for acknowledging the problem with the inks and discontinuing them. Plus, I figured, the recall notice said they'd be releasing new inks soon, so I could just wait.

"Soon" ended up being... a year? Maybe? Possibly more.

The next order I made took a very long time to arrive, but I thought I'd try one more order, since I LOVE their products.

Unfortunately, the next several times I tried to place an order, nearly everything I tried to put in my cart was out of stock. There's no notice on the site itself if something is out of stock - it just wouldn't go into your cart. I wasn't trying to order hot new releases, and I wasn't even ordering in the week after release week when supplies tend to run low. In fact, some of the things I wanted most were older releases (a year old or more) that hadn't been featured on anything in a while. When I emailed Customer Service to ask when they might be back in stock, and to request a better system to let customers know when something isn't available, I got a very dismissive reply.

That was the end of my love affair with PTI - I still think they have amazing products, but if they can't get their products into my hands, what's the point?

The reason I post all this is that I'd sort of thought I was the only one, and I wasn't going to make a big Denouncing Statement or anything like that, since the company still had such good products that other people love. Now that I'm seeing that there are so many others who had my same issues, I want to put my voice with theirs and withdraw my support of the company. I won't stop using the products I already have, but I'll be removing the link from my sidebar and not ordering from them again.