A Day In The Life Of A Record Expert

You may remember a couple of months ago we made a similar blog post to this, following a day in the life of the buying team. In this blog post, we'll follow the journey of a record once it's been bought, and the steps it goes through before it gets into your hands. 

Last time, we covered processing and grading, so we'll pick up at picturing, the next step in the process, following Tom's day of picturing then post. 

Picturing is usually done in large batches, often either a half or full day. We take pictures of each individual record that goes onto our website, so with upwards of 100 new arrivals a day and an average of 4-6 pictures per record, that is a lot of pictures!

We do this to give you as much information as possible about the individual record, but if you want to ask for more information about anything on our website, feel free to get in touch with us and we can send you more information about the record. 

Each pictured record is packed in one of our archival quality inner sleeves, and then into a resealable outer sleeve, labelled with a barcode unique to that record. These are then shelved for ease of access when picking the records for dispatch. 

Tom goes home for lunch, mainly to see his cats. We thought you'd appreciate seeing them too!

Everything on our shelves is in a specific order, kept that way since it was processed, so each record is known to be in an exact position. All customer orders come through to a collated system. Tom will start post by picking the orders set for dispatch that day, starting with international orders, as they are picked up sooner than everything else. 

Once the orders have been picked, each order is packed securely, with a flyer and sweets to thank you for your order. 

Royal Mail collect from us at the end of the day, so we have to make sure everything is ready to dispatch by then. We offer same-day dispatch if your order is placed before 12:30pm, so your new record can get to you as speedily as possible. 

Post usually takes up most of the afternoon, and is mostly a very structured process. We custom order our packaging to ensure the best protection for your records in transit, so your record arrives with you safely. 

Tom is also part of the buying team, so sometimes there will be things to catch up on in the buying inbox, or the last half hour of the day will be spent processing. Tom processes 7" records rather than 12" records, and we have just bought a fantastic collection of modern 7" singles, so he's enjoying processing those. Look out for them in our new arrivals soon!