Tuesday, October 4th 2022
Dear Zotter customers, friends, fans and chocolate lovers,
this is our first update after our initial email from Saturday, October 1st 2022.
So far, we all are coping with this traumatizing event, but we are all doing ok as people. We got water and power back at our homes and it feels wonderful! In situations like these, we really learn to appreciate utilities and things like running water or power.
Mentally, it’s hard to comprehend, what happened to our beautiful Southwest Florida paradise. The level of destruction and deaths is devastating.
But there is also good news: The way how people are coming together in our SW Florida communities shows how we are able to stick together as humans. Reaching out to neighbors, helping each other cleaning up, and there is a huge rescue and recovery effort going on from all kinds of groups, private, and official ones. On City, County, State and Federal level. Linemen from all over poured into the state and we heared today that about 70% of power is already restored.
Our warehouse doesn’t have power, all the chocolate we had in stock is spoiled. We are so saddened by that, because it’s a LOT! All those beautiful bars… but – we will be back at some point! As soon as we have power and the repairs are done to work safely inside, we will request our order from Austria, that’s sitting there and it will include our holiday bars and some other refill of our stock. We won’t have the full assortment available but we think it will be at least a good start.
We met with the landlord today as they are assessing damage on the roof and inside and we hope we’ll get an estimate on how repairs may take soon.
Most importantly: We wanted to thank you from the bottom of our hearts for your outpouring support. Our current focus is to keep our employees paid so they don’t have to worry about that part during the recovery phase and for the time we are closed or can’t make any sales. If you can and want to financially support us, this is the link to our GoFundMe page
Also, we are currently working on issuing the refunds for unfulfilled orders, except Advent Calendar preorders, as we still hope we can make it for them. This is a pretty time-consuming process, please bear with us until we are done. We are through about a quarter right now.
We kindly ask for your patience and support. We will be back, but we don’t know yet when.