TribeBlog

Onetribe has turned 7 years old, and we’re celebrating with a two day in-store sale and party at our showroom and body modification learning space, Onetribe’s ADORN studio, March 12th and 13th.

Customers attending the event will receive 30% off stocked items and made to order standard products such as wood plugs, tunnels, Mayan flared wood items, etc. We are also offering 20% off custom orders booked with a deposit. Other great deals will be available as well, including a chance to peek through sealed and labeled clearance/seconds/discontinued jewelry in many sizes, styles and materials at HUGE discounts, and even bulk discounts (buy 3 get 1 free, buy 5 get 2 free, etc). We want this stuff gone!

We’ll also be giving workshop tours and explaining how our jewelry is made, showing off our new hardware-fixed inlays including the capability to inlay stone into stone (and even triple stone inlays) with no adhesives, and our antiquities collection and research library will be available for browsing as you please.

• Friday, March 12th :: 7pm – 10pm
• Saturday, March 13th :: 12pm – 5pm
• 30% off Stocked/MTO products
• 20% off custom orders with deposit
• (Discounts apply to in store sales only)

The event address is as follows (Click it for a Google map):

Onetribe, 403 Stockton St. Richmond, VA 23224

We are at ground level right in the middle of a large brick warehouse between 4th and 5th streets on Stockton in the Manchester district of Richmond, VA. There is a large lot across the street to park in, and our entrance is right across from the lot. Look for the large Onetribe logo over the door.

If you have any question, please don’t hesitate to get in touch by emailing us from our contact page or calling 804.248.0971. If you’re on Facebook, there is an event page for this event if you’d like to RSVP. If you’re within a reasonable distance, please do come out (and bring friends!) for some great deals and good times, we’d love to meet you in person!

Onetribe LLC will be closed from the afternoon of 12/23 (our last day for production and shipping) until January 4th, 2010 to spend time with our family and friends and get some rest over the holidays.

During that time our site will remain up and we will continue taking orders, but we will not begin filling those orders or returning correspondence (unless it’s extremely urgent) until we return to work fresh and ready to rock it on January 4th. At that point we will resume production  and order fulfillment starting with the oldest orders first and working forward until we are caught up, which usually takes a week or two.

Have a great holiday!

Please see this Holiday FAQ for more information.

Jared, Rachel, Marshall & Amanda

The morning of Thursday, November 26th the Onetribe host server experienced configuration errors which resulted in an open email relay, permitting spam emails to be sent from support@onetribe.nu

Our technical contact spotted this amazingly quickly and locked down the server and killed the mail queue – unfortunately many messages did make it through.

No actual customer data was compromised (we do not actually store ANY financial information on our server, simply your email and shipping information), so you may rest assured that even if you did receive some random spam from Taiwan, it is nothing more than a huge pain in the ass for you and us.

For those of you that did receive messages, I am very, very sorry that this happened. Please rest assured that we are working our asses off to figure out how this happened so that it will never happen again. Unfortunately with automated server system updates and general things-moving-at-the-speed-of-light nature of the internet, it is impossible to guarantee that everything is safe 24/7/365. There are literally thousands, if not near millions of automated systems constantly scouring the internet looking for vulnerable host computers (both commercial servers and your and our own personal computers) to do these sorts of things with.

Again, we are very sorry about any inconvenience this may cause. This has completely ruined our holiday break and we have been and will continue to be working diligently toward a resolution, and quite possibly a server move and full system rebuild just to be on the safe side. We understand that in doing business with us, you are entrusting us with your personal information, and we are both very sorry and determined as hell to make sure this never, ever happens again.

Jared and the Onetribe Team

UPDATE: We have identified the problem as having been a vulnerability with a specific facet of the shopping cart software (present in the actual software package) and not the server security itself. The issue has been resolved.

Onetribe will be closing early Wednesday, November 25th and will remain closed Thursday and Friday so that we may travel to spend time with our friends and families over the Thanksgiving holiday. We will re-open Monday, November 30th.

We will answer emails, return calls and fulfill orders in the order everything is received upon returning.

Those of you doing your own traveling, be safe!

Jared & The Onetribe Crew

Onetribe will be closed today, Wednesday Nov. 11th, in observance of the federal and postal holiday Veteran’s Day. While we do not agree with the actions of our government, we have respect and appreciation for those who have put their personal interests aside to dedicate their lives to loyalty of their country. I know we have some customers that are vets – thank you from each of us here at Onetribe.

Email correspondence, shipping, phone answering and all of that good stuff will resume tomorrow morning (Thursday, November 12th).

We tweaked the front page a little bit the other day. The two biggest visual changes were the addition of our new newsletter module and our FaceBook page button, both in a new column on the right side. We also made the new products section a little larger and removed the large random image at the top to cut down on load time.

The newsletter is now being managed by a third party service (not the writing, just the subscribe/unsubscribe capabilities) so it is no longer attached to your customer account. You can sign up for the newsletter without being a customer and unsubscribe at any time by clicking on the link in the message itself, instead of logging into your account to change it.

Something else we changed is our little mission statement on the front page. We added some wording we thought was necessary to reflect the direction we have been taking Onetribe over the past several years. It now reads (with the addition in bold) “We are an eco-friendly, socially responsible artisan jewelry company specializing in small run & one of a kind natural jewelry for individuals with traditional stretched ear lobe, lip and other perforations.” We frequently get asked why we don’t have this or that, when we’re going to “get” something or why we didn’t make ‘x’ size. Well, it’s because we make virtually everything on the site one piece at a time with our own hands and we don’t carry a huge stock.

We work small runs of material into jewelry – it may be one stone or 25lbs, one specific piece of wood, a limited edition design. All of the materials we work are finite in their existence, and each is unique – we feel those characteristics lend themselves to a less mass produced method of creating jewelry where we are able to pay more attention to each piece and be more selective about what we make. There are some styles that we continue to reproduce because they’re popular, and let’s face it, we’ve got to pay the bills. But we are also very focused on keeping things unique and interesting, and we have been doing more smaller runs of neat items, exclusive designs where we only make one run, and sometimes completely unique one-offs. And of course much of our custom work is 100% one-off as well.

Pondering New Products

We are working on some new products to release before the holiday season, namely some items for those without stretched lobes. Regular sized earrings, and some nice pendants. Technically some of it is outside of the scope of what we say we do here (although let’s be honest, we’re artists, not “plug makers,” we do what we want!), but we are going to be utilizing all of our waste/scraps/seconds and broken pieces and turning them into things people can wear. Really like that hanging style but can’t wear it in your ears? How about a pendant? Love that stone? We can make earrings from it. Gift for mom or the girlfriend? We can do that, and I think we should, especially if it means we’re continuing our mission of utilizing materials to create as little waste as possible. Our focus is piercings but I don’t think we have to discriminate against who we decorate if everyone gains in the end, do you?