Christmas Deliveries 2022 - Royal Mail Strikes and a DPD delivery offer!
Natroma Christmas Deliveries 2022
Royal Mail Strikes - our parcels will be delayed
As you may be aware there are many Royal Mail strike days planned in the weeks leading up to Christmas. The current large scale strike days are: Thursday 20th October, Tuesday 25th October and Monday 28th November.
Other strikes are planned on the following dates, which could lead to disruption:
Current strike days that may affect Christmas deliveries are: Thursday 24th November, Friday 25th November, Wednesday 30th November, Thursday 1st December, Friday 9th December, Sunday 11th December, Wednesday 14th December, Thursday 15th December, Friday 23rd December.
This means that despite us sending out orders on time, at certain times between October and December there may be long delays in Royal Mail parcels being received, sorted and delivered. We are sorry for any inconvenience caused, but this is beyond our control. We cannot guarantee that orders placed in December will arrive in time for Christmas. Please order early this year, or upgrade your delivery service to DPD courier. We will continue to send out orders right up until we close for Christmas. We'd please ask that customers are patient, since we'll be doing everything to can to send out orders as normal but it's very likely that our parcels will take longer than usual to arrive if a Royal Mail service is selected at the checkout.
Beat the strikes with discounted DPD - just £5.95 and it's FREE on orders over £75.
We know how anxious customers can become when Christmas orders are delayed, so we have decided to trial a change to our usual postal service this year. Priority and Standard Royal Mail services will still be available and we'll still offer free postage for non-urgent orders over £35. We'll continue to prioritise orders with Priority Royal Mail (1st class) postage upgrades but the strike action may cause delays to this service.
As an alternative, we are introducing a discounted DPD Courier service. Until Christmas you'll have the option to select a discounted DPD signed for delivery service for £5.95. If you order over £75 the DPD service will be FREE. We'll aim to dispatch orders with this courier dispatch within 1-2 days. This will be a signed for service and you'll receive a text or e-mail from DPD with a 1-hour delivery window. We expect that this service will be quicker than Royal Mail and would recommend this delivery method is selected if your order is urgent, or if you are concerned about receiving items before Christmas. Please note that DPD usually deliver parcels on a next day service for most UK addresses, but may require an additional day for Highlands and Islands and remote addresses etc.
November dates when orders will be delayed:
We'll be attending the Birmingham Christmas in Cathedral Square market again this year. This year our cabin will be open 11am and 9pm between Wednesday 16th and Sunday 20th November 2022 - so we'll be working some long days! Our shop will be closed for a week (our last day will be Saturday 12th November, reopening on Wednesday 23rd November) but the website will continue to accept orders with delayed shipping. We estimate there will be a delay in us shipping orders between Tuesday 15th November and Tuesday 22nd November. If your order is urgent please order early and be reassured that we'll be working very hard to process the order backlog as quickly as we can once we're back!
