Branded Blog

It’s  amazing how quickly we forget. Less than 3 decades ago no-one had heard of email. When someone said “mail”, they meant a letter in the post. A hand-written, hand delivered piece of communication that couldn’t be rushed; couldn’t be followed up immediately; couldn’t be tracked instantaneously. It had to be posted in faith, and received physically, emotively.

These days the mail that is sent to me physically is not passed to me by a smiling post-man, but ends up coolly and efficiently in the little blue metal box that has our number on and stands in its place in the ranks of pigeon-hole PO Box banks that constitute most modern post boxes.  Its’ content is mostly constituted by things that don’t come electronically yet: letters from the bank  (complete with printed signatures purporting to be personalization); speeding fines (all greatly unfair and not my fault, obviously); renewal notices for car licences and magazine subscriptions; the magazines themselves; and stuff ordered on the internet.  As well as a raft of fliers and spam-like mailings that generally go into the bin right there next to the pigeon-hole boxes.

And then every now and then, something special arrives. A letter. Or a card. Something in an envelope that is hand-addressed and has had an actual person lick or stick the back flap down. Something that feels exciting when you see it – that gives off little thrills of anticipation when you pick it up and turn it over, wondering who it’s from.

This month I got two things in the mail that made me smile. One was redemption, registered in a letter; and the other was proof of the pudding, carefully shipped from China.

I have a not-so-extended family. My dad had one brother, and my mom was an only child. So my cousins , my siblings and I grew up together, nestled in the warmth of our little families. We grew up in the dusty but bustling Free State gold-mining centre of Welkom in a time when gold was, well, golden, and the city (they always insisted on that epithet) was booming. The parks were green and luscious, the fountains outside the municipal offices were always flowing in the sunshine, and the wide streets were lined with shops full of people.

Back then we believed that life was possible, if not always easy; and that family stuck together.

But sometimes life is unpredictable. A few years ago my cousin,  with just 6 months separating us in age and having grown up knowing the same people, learning the world in the same place, made some choices that I could not fathom. And I could not support. And so I said good-bye to her after her fathers’ funeral in Welkom, and walked away from both of them.  It hurts to walk away from someone you know so well because you no longer understand them. And it hurt even more because I knew that something seemingly unimaginable would have to change before we spoke again – something I had no control over. I had to let her go and carry on as if that were the way it had to be.

And then  six months ago I wrote a blog about my uncle. And a couple of months after that  I got a slip for a registered letter in my mail-box.

It was the most beautiful, unexpected letter I have received for a very long time. It was from my cousin. And it was a journey back to that relationship that I had left softly on the wet ground of a rainy November day in a Welkom church-yard.

It’s not really necessary to drag you all through the details of it all, suffice to say that we hadn’t spoken in a long time – so long, in fact, that she didn’t know I was writing a blog. Until she stumbled upon it randomly, and read the piece about her father.  And kept reading.  And remembering.  She remembered that there are people who share your history so far back, they know you better than anyone else – even when they lose touch.

And so now, slowly, we’re getting back in touch again.

A letter full of redemption, and a photo of two little blonde girls in red, sitting on the grass of a Free State lawn and wondering where life would take them.

And the second thing I got in the mail this month is one of those things that most little girls dream of but I never did! Getting married was never really on my list of things to do, and yet here I am planning a wedding, as you know.

It’s fascinating (in a macabre sort of way) how the momentum of family and culture takes over when something like a wedding is set in motion. Thankfully the barefoot man and I have stood our ground on the actual ceremony and that has escaped unscathed thus far, but beyond that…  We had decided to have a small wedding – our guest list is now at 95. We set a small budget – and blew it in the first couple of deposit payments.  And I didn’t want a formal wedding dress or flowers….until my mother phoned and I caved.

But I have my pride. And I absolutely foot-stampingly refused to spend upwards of ten thousand rand on a dress that I know I will only wear once (regardless of all good intentions, I do not have a single, married or divorced friend who has ever worn her wedding dress again!).  And so I set off to consult the oracle of my generation (cf.  April Showers) – Google – and discovered a whole new level of globalization at my fingertips.

I found a site that sells, from Shanghai (or ShenZhen in the Chinese translation to English), anything your little heart could desire. From I-pad covers with blue-tooth (or teeth, if you prefer) keyboards, through supporters kit for any US team you can think of, all the way to custom-made evening wear and, yes, wedding dresses.

And not just a couple. I went through just one style of wedding dress for days and never reached the end of the list. There are brazillians of options, and they keep adding to them.

And the best part? The price. For less than the price of the material in Cape Town (which used to be our centre of the rag trade in SA), I could have a dress of my choice made to my exact measurements and couriered to my home address – in 21 days.

With gorgeous, Chinese English emails thrown in for free.

So having carefully assessed the risks in about 3 seconds flat, I chose my preferred dress, deftly took my own measurements with the barefoot man’s metallic handy-man measuring tape, and ordered myself a wedding dress. From China. In 6 minutes. And then I waited, and got several very sweet emails from my supplier contact Jone keeping me up to date, telling me how happy they were to have me as a client, and literally catering to my every (digital) need.

It’s a remarkably clever system: the online wholesaler takes your payment up-front via secure online payment.  And then they, too, wait. They wait until the supplier has produced the order, shipped it to the buyer, and  buyer has received their order, is happy with it and approves payment and only then does the e-tailer release payment to the supplier! Extremely efficient, I thought.

And so once I had the couriers tracking number I digitally watched my parcel go from ShenZhen to Hong Kong. Hong Kong to Joburg. Joburg to CT, and then arrive on my doorstep with a flourish and a signature and very little fuss.

Granted it took a little longer than initially anticipated because firstly, I forgot to specify zip vs. buttons so Jone kindly (“please do not be worry – is no problem”) sent the dress back to the factory and they re-made it with a zip in the back; and secondly, torrential rains in China meant that most of the couriers shut down shop for a few days – which was no issue for Jone who simply retrieved the parcel from the first courier, found one who was shipping and sent it off to me with a minimum of fuss. Service excellence like I have never experienced before.

And the proof of the pudding, as intimated earlier, was in the trying on. It fitted. Perfectly. From Shanghai to CT with one set of rather inexpert measurements, in under two months, and it fitted perfectly.

And we wonder why China is changing the world we live in?

So there it was, two pieces of mail with greatly varied experiences and emotions and outcomes attached.  It’s about the full experience, in the end, isn’t it?

Any kind of transaction, be it emotional or financial, is measured as much by the process as by the outcome.

And if the process around your offerings is not living up to the promise of the transactional outcome, you’ve already lost.

Don’t lose the message in the medium – make sure you have the best damn postman you can afford at every point, and you may find wonderful things in your mail too.