Auburn is being discontinued as a leather. The tannery is closed, Remaining color stock at H&M is Bordeaux (970 s.f), Luggage (750 s.f.) , and Navy (1,700 s.f). Takes about 300 s.f. to make a sofa....

"Rancho" leather comes from China. Up until today, I was told that only Cavalier and Document come out of China. One more to add to that list.

A word on ordering to arrive on a specific date. One of my customer orders was 'caught' by the computer production sequencing for build dates and this is something new I had not known previously.

We had ordered a sofa on April 30th with instructions that it must not ship until June 25th. It was assumed that H&M would schedule this order and reserve the leather which was in-stock at the time of order. This was not to be, and the way the H&M system works as I subsequently learned the past few days is that when you specify the build date (i.e, do not ship until 06/25/09), the order is electronically put at the bottom of the basket and pops up four weeks from the ship date requested. This is all fine unless the leather goes out-of-stock during that waiting period. And this is exactly what occurred. So the piece was not made in time for the customers' desired arrival and we are now waiting on leather.

Lesson Learned. Do Not order with specific delivery dates requested. If you need it by a certain date, make arrangements to store it locally yourself. H&M 's system cannot be relied on to output and order at a pre-arranged certain date, as their production software has no capability to 'hold' a leather that is in-stock.