A quick guide to order status

We’ve added a new tool to our website that allows you to track the status of your order. Our quick order status guide walks you through our new system that we are using to ship all puzzles; we hope that this guide provides insight into how we ship your orders.

As we’re a make-to-order company, we may have long waits due to various procedures taking place outside of house at other firms (e.g. engineers, anodisers, and platers) which can cause delays beyond our control. The most recent two examples are when the platers shut down for two months because they needed to rebuild the electrics due to their corrosive environment and when the engineers had a four-month lead time due to COVID and staff shortages.

We chose to do this so that we can offer more exact timeframes and keep you updated throughout the journey. We’ve been doing this since the beginning of the year, and we’ve discovered that order inquiries have fallen by 85 percent, which has helped both the customer and us.

You will receive an email with a detailed explanation of what is happening and an approximate timeline for each status change. Some processes will happen simultaneously, so you may not receive notification of a specific procedure, but it has occurred. This is also why the order of the statuses could change.

 Order Processing

This is the first step, and it will take place once you have placed your order.

 Machining

This is usually the next step after you place your order, where we will machine the mazes on our CNC machine in-house. The timescale will be included in the email update, but it will depend on how many mazes we need to machine. It will take approximately between 1 and 3 weeks.

Sleeves Anodising

You may not receive this status since it usually occurs simultaneously with machining. This is when the sleeves are now being anodised at PT Surfaces, our colour anodisers. It usually takes 1-2 weeks, depending on how busy they are and how many sleeves they need to anodize.

Plating

This is a step that we have recently added to our V3 mazes; the mazes are delivered to Nottingham Platers to be plated for us. The plating process takes typically 1-2 weeks, and you can read more about why we decided to reintroduce plating here.

Puzzle Assembly 

Once the previous three stages have been completed, we can now put your order together! This could take as little as a day or as long as two weeks, depending on the size of your order and the puzzles you’ve ordered.

Awaiting Shipment

The most exciting development! Your order has been packaged and is ready for one of two shipping methods. If your order is being shipped via Royal Mail, we will take it to the post office or have it picked up. If your order is shipping by courier, it will most likely be picked up by the courier the following working day (DPD/TNT if you live in the EU or FedEx if you live in the ROW).

 Order Complete 

This is the final status and will happen after your order has shipped! You should receive tracking information around the time you receive this status, but if you don’t, please contact a member of the team and we will be able to send it to you.

The order statuses we use are our main processes that take place throughout the order process, though we may add more order statuses to the timeline if we believe this would be useful information for you to know. Our goal is to keep you updated as frequently as possible, and we are always happy to answer any questions you may have.