Thank you for ordering with Barn Light Australia, we appreciate your support of our small Australian Made business.
Some orders are unfortunately impacted by aluminium shortages and associated COVID-19 delays.
While we’ve experienced “soft-delays” (late, but still coming) with product manufacturing during 2021, We are currently experiencing significant delays in manufacturing with some spun aluminium products. This results in an unacceptable delay in getting orders out.
The current situation is unacceptable to us as individuals, nor are we proud of the current situation as business owners.
Being Australian Made, we typically coat our Barn Lights once your order is placed. We collect raw aluminium shades from our metalspinner who keeps between 100~400 units on the shelf at any given time, of various shades sizes.
We have been able to maintain our production throughout these past two years of COVID-19 backlogs however it has unfortunately caught up with our metal spinner, and the metalspinning industry as a whole in the past three months. Much like our domestic “toilet paper shortages”, manufacturers who would typically supply their aluminium from overseas, have been forced to buy locally – A proverbial “Run on the Bank”. While it’s been great for the suppliers, it’s also forced a significant increase in the cost of aluminium, and what we’d call “bad grade” aluminium from flooding the market, some of this aluminium has been sourced from China.
Our metal spinner received his batch of soft aluminium for our 30cm Sydney and 50cm Original Shades just last week from an order placed in October last year. It is unfortunately the wrong grade, and the supplier has no immediate resolution that will resolve our present situation. Our metalspinner has spent the last two days reprogramming to spin using harder materials to spin the 30cm Sydneys as priority and we should be able to get these powdercoated within the next 2 weeks. There are a lot of losses to be incurred, as the harder material doesn’t “form” the way it is supposed to (images attached), resulting in a fair number of rejected parts.
Unfortunately for those purchasing our 50cm Originals, we’re unable to supply these warehouse shades until approximately Late April. Local suppliers have run dry as previously mentioned. Our tonnage of aluminium orders (ordered in October 2021) are expected to be delivered from a shipment originating from Dubai (UAE) which is the only second option from Chinese aluminium suppliers.
With COVID-19 things have gotten busier in the Australian Made market, (yay for the small wins), from our metalspinner, powdercoater through to Australia Post all feeling the weight of consumers looking at sourcing Australian Made products. This has made an impact on getting orders filled in our usual time frame. We have been able to keep up to date until this last month when influences outside our control have impacted.
We understand that this may be an inconvenience to you and if this delay is impacting your build or renovation please get in touch with us so we can work together to try and meet your timeline as best we can.
We have been advised that we should be able to pick up the raw Sydneys at the end of next week, we then have prioritised our powdercoater to be finished as quickly as possible. So again if you have an electrician lined up please get in touch so we can prioritise your order, otherwise if this is not possible we will arrange a full refund.
We apologise again for the delays we are currently experiencing getting your order out to you and thank you for your support during this busy time.
Sincerest regards, and apologies.
Melinda & Jesse
