By Ali & David Mikoleón & Nena&Co. To our loyal customers We know that the last few months have been a bit frustrating for some of you in our Mikoleón community. We’ve struggled with order fulfillment and timely turnarounds, for that we apologize and we want to share a little about the last year. As many of you know my Mom Cony... Is the founder and CEO and was diagnosed with breast cancer in January. Due to her diagnosis she decided to put her health first. She initially wanted to simply close the doors and walk away, but couldn’t bring herself to let go of her Guatemalan employees who depend on Miko to survive. Although my own company @nenaandco was already under staffed and overwhelmed, we couldn’t stand by and not offer to help. We decided to help keep this piece of her legacy afloat while she recovered. Her passion is to create beautiful products and, more importantly, give consistent employment to deserving artisans. However, as we dug in to Miko’s backend we realized that there were several undeniable issues that were driving her company to struggle. The single greatest issue was her pricing to her customers. It’s hard to understand the true cost of high quality and of paying a living wage and benefits to the craftsmen that hand make each detail of Miko’s heritage shoes, but needless to say the cost is high. So while Cony wanted to create an advantageous price point for her customers, she was also losing on every pair of boots/shoe sold. Family Larsen We absolutely share the same values but also realized that changes had to be made. One of which was the retail price of her shoes. We needed to make a change in one of the following areas the 1) retail prices or 2) the quality of the boots. Being that she was losing on each boot she sold we decided to maintain the high quality standards but would have to raise the retail price. Running a different company, I’ve had to make similar price changes to our own product, we know how incredibly painful it is not only for the customers but for us. You risk losing a lot of customers who don’t understand or won’t accept the change or perhaps can’t afford the new price.I hope you understand, it’s not to take more, it’s actually with hopes to keep her business going. We decided that once we made the change we would send out several discount offerings to her loyal customers as they adjusted to the change. So we’d like to take this opportunity to start now with an additional 20% off the 20% off sale with code “THANKYOU”. Family Larsen Let’s talk about shipping and customer service. Collectively we have downsized during this difficult time. We have a smaller office, less people and less craftsmen. It no longer made sense for us to fulfill and ship our own orders with less people and less space. We outsourced this part of our business about 3.5 months ago and despite our best effort and that of the fulfillment company, it has not been as smooth as we’d hoped. We WILL get there, I promise we will. We also now have a dedicated customer service representative Monday, Wednesday and Friday whom you can email at onlinesupport@mikoleon.com. You can expect her to respond to your emails within 48 hours. Please do not DM any social channels with customer service inquiries. You will be directed back to our email onlinesupport@mikoleon.com. Again, I personally want to apologize for the challenges and frustration any of you may have experienced. We will continue to work on our process and to better serve you and honor our beautifully innovative mamá, la Señora Cony❤️. She doing great btw. She’s halfway through her chemo treatments and is very optimistic! Sincerely, Ali and David
