Lead times explained

For the most part, people understand that it takes a bit of time for a set of wheels to go from "order placed" to "order shipped," but sometimes it takes a bit of explanation. 

First, as our journey toward becoming a custom wheel shop has solidified, we don't keep anything built in stock. Every single wheel, even "standard" ones like FSW3 and RFSW3, is built to order. While the FSW3 and RFSW3 are prominent in any sales report we might run for ourselves, they don't dominate or anything close to it. So while we have a pile of rims and a ton of spokes and several sets of hubs in stock, the variety of combos we offer means that we need to maintain adaptability. The more standard things are usually fairly quick to turn around, but they aren't built and hanging on a peg, waiting for their forever home. 

Margins in this business are tight (this business being November, not the industry as a whole), which means that you can't have a ton of working capital tied up in potentially very long term inventory, and you have to be efficient with both time (the most limited and valuable of all resources) and "sneaky costs." Shipping is the ultimate sneaky cost, as we pay nearly the same shipping cost for a single set of rims as we do for a box of 10, and we do intact try to minimize physical waste as well. We have enough stuff going through the shop that we're ordering multiple times a week, but it's not "get customer order and immediately place corresponding supplier order for any needed stuff."

The hubs we use are expensive. And they have a HUGE number of variants (color, front and rear axle diameter and width, drilling, drive type, and rotor attachment type). We have 5 "primary" hub supplier brands, regularly sell two beyond that, and several others on occasion. Each of these has at least three model types that we use. This is so demanding of inventory that even the hub brands don't keep everything built and ready to go. King and I9 almost always build hubs to order from adaptable components, and White often does this at least with some of their colors. That's super smart and very necessary, but it adds some days to the process.

With so many variants in what wheels you could buy from us, there is obviously a fair degree of overlap in what some of our wheels do. Even a super keen observer wouldn't notice a marked ride or performance difference between each and every of our wheels - I sure can't (a topic for another day). But buying a set of custom wheels is about opening the garage door to get your bike for a ride and saying "oh yeah, that's the one" as much as anything else. 

With compelling new products cropping up all the time, our mission will continue to be vetting them and making them available in builds as they merit, it's probably just going to take a few days for us to get them to you.