To our Dusty Strings community,
Following ten weeks of working as best we could from home, we have been back in the workshop now since June, and are relieved to be doing what we love, which is building instruments! We have really appreciated everyone's patience so far, and we hope you'll continue to be patient with us. Our first priority has to be the health of our employees and our community, and we are carefully following all of the safety practices recommended and required by the state of Washington. Within those limitations, we are doing the best we can to answer the phones and to respond to orders and emails as quickly as possible, and we're grateful for your understanding if it takes us longer than usual to get back to you!
String & Accessory Orders
We should be able to fill most orders for strings and accessories within a few days. At this point, we don't expect any significant delays, but we will let you know if we think it will be more than a week before your order ships.
Mail Service Disruptions
The mail service has been slower and more irregular than usual in recent months, and we are seeing huge variations in how long it takes a package to arrive, and even how long it sits at the post office before it is scanned into their tracking system. If your package is delayed on our end, we will let you know. Unfortunately, once we have handed it off to USPS, there is nothing we can do to investigate the status beyond what the tracking information shows. Packages are reliably being delivered, just not always in the normal amount of time.
If you are trying to place an order through our website for shipping outside of the US and you receive a "no shipping options available" message, that means that the United States Postal Service is not currently accepting mail for delivery to your country. We are sorry that we do not have any way to get around this, and we hope you can wait until the situation improves!
Instrument Orders
We have resumed building and shipping instruments and would love to answer questions or talk with you about placing an order! If your dream instrument is not in stock, we can make an educated guess about how long it will take us to build it, but please allow some extra time for surprises. We are still adjusting to our limited capacity and safety restrictions.
We sincerely appreciate your support during these uncertain times. It is hard to be a small business in the best of times, and this is a challenge on a scale we haven't faced in our 40 years, so we want you to know that both your continuing interest and your words of encouragement mean a lot to us!
We've been sorting through some of our old photos and documents recently, and we thought it would be fun to share a few "time capsule" moments from Dusty Strings history. To start off with, here is an authentic historical document from 1980 - a Seattle Times profile of the fledgling Dusty Strings Dulcimer Company.
