Out the door and should be at your doorstep in the next few days.  They were packed and ready to go on April 15, but we weren’t going anywhere near the Post Office on tax day   And they were pretty happy we waited till the next day too!

May coin samples are done and the final order is in, so we expect to have May out the door on time as well.

But OOPS!  We forgot Pathtags in April!  Fear not - we’ll get you back in May.  May’s pack will have a two-fer of tags that will catch you up.

Another delay as China recovers from CNY backlog and a labor shortage due to the worst winter in the last 50 years.  This unexpected delay caused the coins to arrive in the middle of our shipping manager’s vacation which put off mailing another 4 days.  This is an annoying, but interesting, peek into how events on a world scale can affect even the smallest of enterprises.  Here’s an excerpt from the factory president that you may find interesting.  Also following this are some links to news stories about the situation there.  We had heard nothing about it until this email so thought others would be interested to learn more too.  1.66 MILLION people were displaced by the snow disasters and 485,000 buildings collapsed!

In case you're not following the news in China, here is a bit of an update that explains what is going on.

You have probably heard of Chinese New Year before. It is based on the Lunar cycle, and signifies the change of the Chinese Zodiac sign. For the Chinese culture and the practitioners of Feng Shui, this is the most important event of the year, and is a National holiday, sort of like our Christmas and New Years combined into one. This year it fell on February 7th, and signified the change from the year of the Pig to the year of the Rat. Traditionally it is a 15 day celebration where families get together and honor the memories of their ancestors and share stories with the current family members.

Many of the industrial work centers in China are located in the South-East portion of the country, just North of Hong Kong. However, the workers often live as much as 1000 miles away [Mike’s Note:  This really illustrates how enormous the country of China is!] from the factories and sometimes even further. For some of these workers it is a 2-3 day oddesy to get home by a combination of trains, busses and cars to finally reach their destination.

This year was one of the worst years in recorded history for winter weather in China. The first week of February they had some of the worst snow storms in over 50 years. These storms shut down many of the train lines and bus routes for several days, leaving holiday travelers stranded all over the country.

A couple weeks later, just as most people were traveling back to work after the holiday, another storm hit and stopped everything in its tracks once again. Basically, in the end, most the country was shut down for the entire month of February. This has caused an economic impact to the country that is the worst in over 50 years.

So what does all this mean to us? Well, the factories were shut down for the first 2 weeks of February for the New Years Holiday. When they came back to work on February 14th, about 1/3 of the workforce was still in the process of trying to get back to work. In fact, it was not until the first week of March, that everyone was able to get back to work.

The New Years holiday and the subsequent storms also lead to a 4-week delay in the transportation of goods within the country, and this has impacted several different areas. First, the raw materials needed to make the products were delayed for a month. In addition to this, new macnines that were ordered to be able to meet the demands for production were also delayed for a month. These slow-downs, combined with the loss of staff, has created a situation where now, the production schedules got about 4 weeks behind original estimates. All of this has affected the delivery of products, and this is the cause for the delays, and for us being out of stock on several items right now. This problem is not isolated to our factory. Most of the companies in China are facing similar production schedule issues as well.

Fortunately, the storms have passed, the new machines are scheduled to arrive next Monday, the raw materials are now starting to roll in, and nearly everyone is back at work, so in a week or two, everything should be back on track, and the production levels of the factory will be better than ever before.

I know that there are hundreds of people out there waiting for items. I really appreciate everyone being patient and understanding the situation that we are in right now, and hopefully, by the end of March, everything will be back in stock, and all of the customers and dealers will have all the products they desire.

I know that this has been a long month, but I wanted to let everyone know exactly what was happening, and why the production schedules have fallen behind. Again, I thank all of you for your understanding, and your loyal support of our company.

Story 1

Story 2

Story 3

Search on Google News for “China Snow Disaster” for more news stories. 

Hello everyone, sorry it’s been so silent on here, but rest assured – the club rolls on!  We have had the April and May designs into the mint for about two weeks now and expect the April coin to be ready around 4/10 so should ship on the 15th as we like!

April showers bring May flowers and we talked about how we could do some cool coins along these lines.  So what we have coming in April and May is a mini series really.  The April coin is a raindrop coin featuring wavy-water textures under a lot of translucent colors.  The wavy lines you see will be submerged under the enamel and we think this will give the coin a pretty cool “shimmery” look!

And those showers bring May flowers!  The May coin is a flower themed coin that is shaped to fit with the April coin like a puzzle piece.  The end result is a mini set of coins that integrate with each other.

This concept started as a suncatcher idea and evolved into this “linked coin” concept which is what we moved forward with.

The June and July designs are “on the drawing board” and we promise to be more diligent with posting here.  Mike did post a blog update about a week ago.  However, Mike uses a blog posting tool that handles multiple accounts.  Yesterday his wife said, “Your dad posted a comment to our blog that those coins look neat.”  lol.  Ooops.  And thanks Dad!

Well, we’ve been saving this one kind of as a cool surprise, and we have to say – cool it is!

We contacted Mr. Chris Mackey and commissioned him to create a St. Patricksy coin design for the March issue.  We asked for it to be a Pathtag Carrier coin similar to the Pathtag Sherpa Geocoin and man did he deliver!

This great March theme coin will be available in the RE edition that goes to everyone subscribed by the end of February as well as the SE edition available to members only in the Members Only Store.

Below are the pictures from the factory.

February coin samples are in and production will start soon for the February coins.  Here is a preview of the regular edition that will go out to everyone, the SE coin in February will be a silver version of this coin.

This coin was designed to highlight the worldwide appeal of Geocoins.  The front is a wireframe earth design and on the reverse are the flags of the 22 countries we ship coins to most often (in no particular order).  Can you name all 22 flags?

January starts a new year, one we hope that will be full of celebration and good times caching with friends.  And what’s more useful when out in the wilderness than a bottle opener?

Following in our “usable coin” theme tradition for January (Year 1 was a ROT 13 coin, Year 2 was a Rangefinder coin) we give a nod to the original functional coin with a glow in the dark bottle opener Geocoin!

The coin only glows on the Rot13 side, but it should be bright enough to keep track of around the campfire.  The coin comes with a keyring attachment, so you can put it on your keys.  Not only is that handy for porting around a favorite tool of many, but with the tracking code… you can post “if found” instructions on the coin’s Geocaching.com page and the glow in the dark enamel should help you find them if they fall out of your pocket while hanging upside down from a tree limb to get a micro while night caching.  (and who hasn’t?)

The coin comes complete with a catchy toast you can use if you find yourself the center of campire attention and nothing to say.

Really… all in all a Swiss Army Knife of a Geocoin.  And a pretty cool design.

The SE version will be an enamel-free antique silver version of this coin.  We are doing this because traditionally all January coins are pure metal coins - but we just loved the black nickel coloring with yellow glow scheme. 

The Members Only Store still contains a lot of non-SE coins from previous editions (although, two are currently sold out and one is dangerously close) so to help you identify the SE ones quickly, we will use a template similar to the one below:

The background watermark will have the SPECIAL EDITION text and the yellow star.

We encourage anyone wanting to communicate that the SE coins you get are the real deal to use the photo posted in the members only store for use on trading sites, in sales, etc.