BLACK ARMOURY & COVID-19

INFORMATION - Updated 27/03/2020 at 10:00 CET

We've had a few questions about how the Corona Virus situation may affect Black Armoury and your orders.

Things are changing almost daily, so the situation may evolve. If it does we will inform you here.

First and most importantly we wish to encourage you to please stay safe and respect all official containment efforts in your country to slow the spread of the virus.

Black Armoury is located in France. The French government has just issued a number of confinement measures that will affect us for the weeks or months to come.

As of 27/03/2020 the company and the offices remain open.

  • Our site remains open and you may still place your orders
  • We are still shipping orders worldwide. 
  • Some reasonably short delivery delays can be expected, within the EU
  • We are noticing long delays to the USA, Asia and Australia. The length of the delays seems to depend on individual cities and states with different confinement situations. Please be patient.
  • Shipping to all "pick-up points" (shops, post offices) is suspended until further notice.
  • We are being supplied by most of our brands and partners
  • Sanitary measures are in place at Black Armoury to ensure your safety and ours
  • Please privilege email (sales@blackarmoury.com) to reach us. We are on minimal staff (one person) : monitoring Facebook messages and phone calls in addition to email will slow our order fulfilment efforts.

More details :

Stock and Suppliers

At the moment the majority of our suppliers are delivering product as usual, but :

  • ARCEM, Destroyer Modz and all DOHEMA products (including masks) are currently delayed 15 to 30 days (45 days for masks) due to logistics lockdowns in their countries of origin (they either cannot ship or are not receiving raw materials).
  • Bellatore swords are experiencing delays
  • Other brands were still producing and shipping as of yesterday, but lockdowns are announced. We will inform you here of any additional supplier closings.

Customer Service

The company and the offices remain open, but due to the current situation we are on reduced customer service hours with only one person in the office. This is due to the greatly increased workload to manage logistics, production and supplier relations to keep things going. 

Concerning your orders :

  • We are shipping strictly on Tuesdays and Fridays only until further notice
  • We are responding to email and messages in the mornings only.  Please be patient, we may take an extra day to get back to you. We WILL respond to all messages.

Please don't hesitate to get in touch about how all this affects your specific orders.

As stated above, we ask that you please contact us via email rather than phone or Facebook. This allows us to better centralise communication and to spend more time managing our supplier relations and fulfilling your orders.

Shipping of your orders

Some of our shipping companies (Colissimo for example) have stopped all shipments to China and Hong Kong until further notice. DHL is still delivering to China and Hong Kong - but please be aware that we cannot ship items longer than 120 cm via DHL, so longer swords and polearms are out.

Shipping to all other countries, for the moment, is possible but may take a few days longer than usual via Colissimo. DHL is still "next day" - but again, no longer swords or polearms.

UPDATED : 

  • Expect 24 to 48 hours additional delays in shipping as we are not always "picked-up" by the transporters on time.
  • Some reasonably short delivery delays can be expected within the EU.
  • We are noticing long delays to the USA, Asia and Australia. The length of the delays seems to depend on individual cities and states with different confinement situations. Please be patient.
  • With the closure of most non-essential shops in many countries, we have temporarily suspended the possibility of delivery to pick-up points (shops and post-offices). We simply do not know if your order will be delivered by this method. Shipping to both residential and business adresses remains open.

Due to most of you probably being confined to working from home, we highly recommend that you verify that your delivery address at checkout time is your HOME address and not work... it's easy to overlook it by habit!

Office Hygiene and Product Safety

There has been a bit of concern around the survival for several days of the virus on surfaces and items. There does not seem to be consensus on this. We simply are not sure, so we are taking precautions until an official position is clear.

We are lucky enough at Black Armoury to be based in a low population area with no commute to the offices (very short walking distance). So, even though France is now in "confinement", it is still possible to work. All other travel and "going into town" are at a strict minimum. Our personal infection risk is therefore rather low, but we remain vigilant.

We have instituted the use of disinfectant hand gels regularly in the office and stock room, and a regular disinfection cleaning of surfaces in the building.

We have also started treating items arriving into our stock with disinfectant spray (an EN 14476 virucide) to help reduce any risk to us, and to you. The spray we are using is hypoallergenic. Any disinfectant smell should be gone by the time the product gets to you, but if it's still there will disappear shortly. 

This may be overly cautious, but better safe than sorry.

Finally we wish to repeat our encouragement to please stay safe and respect all official containment efforts in your country to slow the spread of the virus. The more we all play our part, the sooner we'll come out of this.

The Black Armoury team wishes you and your loved ones to come through these complicated times safe, healthy and ready to restart a normal life as soon as possible.

All our best,

Anthony Rischard - Managing Director - Black Armoury