About ordering

If you are in the US or Canada you can use our online shopping cart, or you can give us an order by e-mail -queen@bottlehead.com , or you can call us at 360-697-1936 M-F 9-5 PT. We take VISA/MC/AMEX/DISC, and we process your charge the day we take your order.

OK, let's get it right out- we do things very differently than a lot of our competitors. Which means that while our sonic quality is generally higher and our prices are much lower, you may have to wait a while to get your order, even though we charge your order the day we get it.

Why? There's a few reasons.

First, we run a very tight profit margin. If you can't figure this out by looking at our prices, well, we're not sure we're the right manufacturer for you. By charging orders the day they come in, we have the cash flow to operate on a cash basis with the distributors of our major parts like chassis plates, MagneQuest transformers, wood bases, etc  - which means we send a check with every purchase order rather than asking them to carry us for 30 to 90 days or more like a lot of manufacturers do. And in that way we keep our costs down. This means we must order in small quantities, virtually to order, and it takes some time for all the individual parts in your kit to come to us to be packed together.

Secondly, we work hard to get you unique parts like old stock tubes for your kit. This stuff is not easy to find in quantities anymore (we are excited to see lots as small as 20 old stock 12AU7s!) let alone at reasonable prices, and so we are always running low and frantically searching for more, particularly as we have seen our business double in the past year. We try to carry a lot of upgrades and extras for a given kit, and this means more and more inventory to keep on hand. Sometimes we are out of stock on a part for a period of time.

Thirdly, some of  the transformers and inductors we use are custom built to order, stacked by hand by Mike LaFevre of MagneQuest. Custom work is just that, an item is custom made to order for a specific customer. This takes time, and implies a commitment by our customers to accept the 6-12 weeks it takes to get these parts made and follow through on their order. 

Lastly, like everyone else in this odd little corner of the electronics business, we are at the mercy of our distributors. Some of them have huge clients like Boeing, and our relatively teeny orders can get put on hold. We try to find manufacturers who are willing to work with us, but it is challenging to find a manufacturer like Mike LaFevre  who works hard to make an extremely high quality product available to us in small quantities on a regular basis.

And so it can take a few weeks to see your custom kit. We have a delivery status page to keep our customers informed of the shipping status of our products - potential backorders, when we have kits ready to ship, and everything in between. We try to update this page at least twice a week.

So if you are willing to wait a bit for superb quality at the best prices, we invite you to try our products.

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