Read All About It…….In The Next 6 Days Anyway!!

For some time now, the guys and gals up here at Epic HQ have been working till the wee small hours getting everything ready for the new season, in anticipation of things to come.

As we get closer to Bonfire Night on the fabulous fifth and look toward New Year’s Eve, the energy around epic HQ starts to tingle in the air, like a gentle sleeping dragon awakening after a period of inactivity flexing its wings, ready for take-off and a new season of manic fireworks retail… we love it!!

As you may have seen from our previous blogs and photo’s, we are used to working “strange hours” to get ahead of the game and make sure we deliver our promises with as little fuss as possible. In this game it pays to be one step ahead and as such it’s not unusual to see one of our crew buses making its way up the A50 full of sleeping ninja’s at 6:30 AM, after a long night in the bunkers.

These things have to be done when you get a phone call advising us the ship will be docking at “daft o’clock” and needs to be packed away a.s.a.p., British weather being what it is.

With almost 50 new products for the 2012 season and excitement reaching fever pitch, even we can’t wait to let a few of our new big boys off. The videos from our China testing team give us an idea what the effects will be like, but a video won’t set the hairs on the back of your neck standing to attention like the real thing does. If you’re not into fireworks this might be lost on you.

Keep an eye on the website over the next couple of weeks as changes are being made daily as more and more of the good stuff arrives. Some have landed on UK soil already, however, some are somewhere in the South China Sea just a few days away, with the last few products to set sail for us shortly.

With our 2012/2013 brochures, proofread by literally everybody in the company (except Bruce) and amended where required, the printers now have the go-ahead to run off half a million copies of our eagerly awaited catalogue. This year we have so much to show you, we had to double the size of our brochure!! Expect the new brochures to be hitting the doormats in the next couple of weeks.

Eagle-eyed regulars to our head office may have noted in the past couple of years, five 40 foot containers sat in the top corner of our 5 acre site, again to reduce to cost of our top quality pyro and the increased demand since we moved to our new HQ just 2 minutes from junction 36 of the M1, right slap bang in the centre of the UK, we now have now increased this to TEN.

Although China is in the midst of an economic boom, with wages on the increase, this means that companies in the fireworks capital of the world are having to be a little more savvy nowadays when trying to hold on to their staff. Now that many Chinese workers are in a position to buy fireworks themselves, some factories over there now are forced to offer incentives such as transport into work and free lunches in an attempt to ensure they get the best possible staff. Regrettably, the knock-on effect is that in some instances the prices of some of the pyro has almost doubled because of this.

Jimmy, who visits China some four or five times a year, and has done for the last 20 years or so has managed to broker a deal with the far-east, enabling us to continue retailing the best quality fireworks at the best possible prices most of which are less than half the RRP. Furthermore, this year we are increasing our stock levels to almost double that of recent years in order to meet the increased demand. Bulk buying has always paid dividends, allowing us to keep the prices around our target of half the RRP which is what our customers have come to expect. Unfortunately, there will have to be a few price increases to cover increased import duties, fuel costs, and other things out of our control, but it is just a few and they are minimal. We did for a while put some of our “new for 2012” stock on the website headed “coming soon” but had to take them off as customers were so eager to get hold of these, mental blocks arrived omitting the “coming soon” and orders came flooding through.

To view the new stuff just type in to your search bar www.youtube.com/user/EpicFireworks and see it for yourself.

We will, of course, keep you updated and as soon the remaining stock is here and ready to go, you will be the first to know.

Patience is they say a virtue. But fortunately for you ……not for much longer.