Welcome to 2010, a time for rebuilding and repairing.
I know the last thing any of you want to hear is a bunch of sorry excuses or empty promises,
so I’ll save you the bull and get right to the point.
The first rumor that I want to lay to rest is the fact that NO!! we have not gone out of business.
Admittedly, it may seem like that has been the case, but it couldn’t be farther from the truth.
Susan and I both have had a laundry list of problems to live through over the past couple of years,
but we’ve never had any intention of shutting Arrowhead down.
The second, and most important, thing I want to address is
our failure to supply our customers with the service they deserve.
We are not actively seeking new orders until we take care of every customer that we owe product to.
This is our foremost priority. We will not attend a single show or return to selling on eBay until we have made sure that every single customer that has had an outstanding order receives their merchandise.
We will also be actively checking and responding to e-mails. I know there are quite a few people
that would love to wrap their hands around my neck about now, but please refrain from
telling me about it in e-mails. Those will be ignored. Civilized e-mails will be responded to as quickly as we can. It can still take a few days for us to respond because we’re mainly focussing on getting these backorders filled and shipped and, to be completely honest with you,
I suck at e-mails, but I’m going to do my best to get better at it.
For those of you that are interested in knowing what happened and where we’ve been, I’ll try to briefly explain. After my back surgery we really thought everything was going to be okay. We knew it was going to take a little time to heal up and get back up to speed, but what we didn’t plan on was everything else that went with it.
For the few of you that haven’t experienced severe depression, let me tell you it sucks, BIG TIME!!
We were warned that life as we knew it was going to change after the surgery,
but they didn’t prepare us for just how much it was going to change. Everything we loved to do stopped.
It was impossible to go fishing because I couldn’t carry a tackle box or walk on uneven ground.
No more riding the scooter or riding our bikes in the evening. I couldn’t even sit through a two hour movie. Pretty soon the depression consumed everything, to the point of not caring about anything.
All life became was traveling 70 miles twice a week to go to doctor appointments and
trips to the pharmacy for more pain pills. Neither of us could concentrate on anything and
I couldn’t sit at the machine for more than an hour or so without having to lay down for two hours.
The more hate e-mails I got, the less often I even bothered to check my e-mail,
until it got to the point I completely stopped. Susan fell in the backyard and broke her elbow
and then we rolled our Durango and camper multiple times down the middle of the Interstate
on the way out to spend a couple of days with my mom while she had knee replacement surgery.
Fortunately, neither of us were seriously injured physically, but mentally we had reached the breaking point.
The harder we tried, the worse things seemed to get.
Finally, it got to the point we had to do something drastic to snap out of it, to break the string.
We sat down and put together a plan to pull ourselves out of it and the one thing that always brought us down the most was also our only way out. We had to make things right with Arrowhead.
It’s not our “New Year’s Resolution”, those never seem to last. It’s our only hope and our only choice.
We know it’s going to take a lot of hard work to get caught up and
it’s going to be an even more daunting task to regain the trust and respect of our customers.
We’ve let a lot of good and decent people down and we are extremely sorry for that.
It was never our intent or desire to let things get as far out of control as they have.
It is our promise, however, to set things right and do our very best to once again
provide quality accessories to good people at a fair price. It’s not going to happen overnight,
it’s going to take a few weeks to get everything out, but we will get everybody what is owed to them.
Thanks for listening and, to those of you that have stood behind us through everything, THANK YOU!!
Duane and Susan Drew
Arrowhead Aluminum Accessories
