Hi All - Tom here from Atom Packs. This would be my first ever post!
Firstly - huge love and thanks for all of the support that this forum has given our company over the last 18 months. We get about 5% of our daily traffic from this site so thanks for representing.
You'll not see much action from me on here - I likely won't reply to messages or comments not because I don't care but I honestly don't have the time to monitor so many channels of communication: between instagram, my personal email and the website it's all already too much to manage! If you need advice or have a question messaging via the website is 100% the way to go:
https://www.atompacks.co.uk/contact
RE the recent price change - we now have a team of four working full time here: Laura, Jen, Phoebe and Em (bio's of everyone coming to the site soon) - they are my absolute saviours and deserve paying as much as I can afford to hand them. There are no bentleys on the horizon for me at this time (perhaps a nice rusty transit). The price was kept as low as we could for a long time and this was a big reason for our early growth, especially overseas. Along side this we also recently became VAT registered, this is a complex and grown up affair that I never wanted to have any part in but we're lucky to have seen enough early success to be having to make this choice at this time - this decision (along with a b@llocking from my accountant) was also a prompt to for the recent pricing action - along with an effort to slow down a pretty unsustainable growth curve that was in danger of outstripping our production capacity
You'll see a smart new website soon, along with more off the shelf packs, a few more jazzy accessories and then a customisation corner where you can do whatever you want to whatever you want (within reason, please). Custom work is a wildly inefficient way to do business (it's a huge barrier to productivity and it's actually amazingly wasteful with fabric as you end up scrapping MUCH more than you would if you offered a standardised item) so it will come at a price that reflects the time involved in finalising the design with the customer, the cost of the wasted material and also extra manufacturing time involved in creating something non-standard.
I will always offer custom work, it keeps me interested and is a sort of forced product development that helps drive our product forward, after all, some of our best ideas have come from custom work. At some point we just have to be realistic about how much we can take on and what people pay for it.
Thanks again to all - I'm off to the long trail next week for some much needed R+R and also some product testing
Tom