Nordic Nest is an (on-line only?) store in Sweden. You can get all sorts of stuff from Sweden on it. The site seemed very legitimate, so one day, I thought, what the heck, and placed an order.
As soon as I press ‘pay’, however, I got a notice from my credit card — they wanted me to enter an extra security code. I did that, not too alarmed — I figured they have to check extra if it’s an international purchase.
Well, I don’t remember what led me that way, but a while later found me on all these sites in which Nordic Nest was proclaimed as — not quite a scam — just not entirely trustworthy. Whatever that means! And then I found all these complaint sites where entry after entry claimed to have made orders from Nordic Nest that never arrived — or arrived after 3 months or something. I thought, oh dear, let me not depend on this stuff reaching its destination.
Lucky me, though — it all arrived perfectly, on time, and with no problems. Let me explain exactly how it worked, at least for me:
(Note: I am of course in the USA. A lot of the complaints were from British people. So this experience might be location-specific.)
First, I placed the order on March 12. A confirmation email from Nordic Nest arrived just a few minutes afterward. I bought five items. When I was picking them out, the wool blanket had a warning attached to it: not currently in stock, expect a 3-4 week delay. The idea was that the blanket by itself would ship separately and later. So I was prepared for that delay, but instead, a mere week later, I got a second email from Nordic Nest, saying that all five items had been shipped! So I guess they had the blanket in stock after all.
Nordic Nest has a page where they describe how long it takes to ship things. They talk about their ‘warehouse’, and that you can expect deliver about 7-14 days after items have been dispatched. I therefore assumed the warehouse was in the USA, maybe New York or something. But that’s not the case. The warehouse is in Germany. I know that now because the second email from Nordic Nest came with a DHL tracking number. The DHL site reveals the items originate in Hamburg, Germany, and after a few days, they end up in Frankfurt (Frankfurt is where Heidi — the character in the book — spends the winter! Frankfurt is also where Anne Frank was born.)
Based on that last entry from March 23, I assumed that my package must have made its way hopefully onto a cargo ship bound for the US. However, I soon had doubts again, because I searched for ‘IPZ Frankfurt’, trying to figure out what IPZ stands for. Again, I stumbled on all sorts of complaint sites that claimed IPZ Frankfurt is a giant delivery center. There’s no monitoring, no tracking, and packages get swallowed into a black hole. One person specifically claimed that a bunch of the packages get stolen out the back door. Another said that upon delivering packages to IPZ Frankfurt, German Post no longer claims responsibility for it; in their eyes, they have already passed the package on to the US Postal Service, even though the package is still in Germany.
So again I thought, I guess I’ll just never see this package. But maybe I assumed that too soon — the complained about the German Post — but I don’t think German Post handles Nordic Nest packages. I think it is DHL all the way.
Well, I spent a few days refreshing the Tracking Page, hoping something new would show up, but it seemed a futile, and I left it alone for a while. I was expecting, maybe in two months something will budge? Instead, though, it was a mere seven or eight days.
So it came less than a month after I ordered on March 12. The package told me ‘Welcome Home’.
Yes, you are very welcome home, darlings. This is after I had tossed things out and aside, but it was immaculate on the inside — everything arranged perfectly. Those Sealed Air bags with the green text I believe can be recycled in the bins for plastic bag recycling outside most grocery stores.
And the bubble wrap was for this delight…
This is now my new favorite cup. Nordic Nest has other cups and mugs with Astrid Lindgren characters. Actually, there’s only like two more — so sad! If only there were more. I am going to hopefully collect the others. To find them, just go to the site and search for ‘Astrid Lindgren’.
And this was the wool blanket that wasn’t going to be in stock for another three or four weeks:
I haven’t taken it out of its bag yet, but it seems perfectly fine. For a wool blanket, it actually feels very light. You can see the full blanket here — isn’t it beautiful? Oh, and you’ll notice on the site that the ‘3-4 week delay’ warning is no longer there — now they can ship it from their warehouse within 2-5 days.
Finally, I got some kitchen towels:
These surprised me a bit — I think of kitchen towels as the furry, terrycloth variety. These kind of feel like silk. You can see the individual threads, so they look like tapestries, not like towels.
For example, if you look at the small picture of the summer flowers towel on the site, then you can’t see any threads — though if you click to zoom in, then you do.
So any case, everything came just as it was supposed to.
The only other thing to say is that on the DHL tracking page, it told me the weight was 1.814. That was it, no units given. I knew enough to assume this at least was 1.814 kilograms, not pounds. But 1.814 kilograms didn’t sound heavy enough for the five things I’d bought — I’d assumed the wool blanket by itself was at 10 pounds. I hoped this was a mistake — or maybe that Germany has its own measuring system where 1.8 actually means 18, or something. My fear was that after all, Nordic Nest was a scam and they were shipping miniature items, sized right for dolls.
But no, the package arrived and the weight is listed right on the address label — 1.8 kg. I just looked it up, and 1.8 kg is about 4 pounds. Well, the package seems like more than 4 pounds to me, but whatever, it has not affected the contents I had ordered.
So that’s it for the Nordic Nest experience. Worth it just to get something that’s got words like this printed on it:
mejshasan.com 