Shortly after Kashwere LLC’s robes were featured as one of “Oprah’s Favorite Things,” Oprah Winfrey phoned the Northridge company to buy a few for her trainer and some close friends.

But Winfrey couldn’t get through. Peter Seltzer, Kashwere’s owner, had added lines, but it didn’t matter. The phones were ringing constantly from people across the country trying to get the robes before Christmas.

Eventually, Winfrey called the cell phone of a Kashwere vice president and was able to make her purchase, but others weren’t so lucky. The fallout from Winfrey’s blessing quickly overwhelmed the capacity of Kashwere, and orders were pouring in faster than they could be filled.

The $1.5 million worth of inventory on-site when the favorite things episode aired Nov. 22 wasn’t nearly enough. And without a sizable infrastructure like Williams-Sonoma Inc. or Nike Inc., other companies whose items were featured on Oprah’s list, Kashwere didn’t have the muscle to handle a deluge in the fourth quarter already a busy period.

“It is almost like what you would imagine going to war would be like,” a shell-shocked Seltzer said. “No matter how much you prepare, you can’t know what it is really like.

“The power of Oprah is serious and not to be believed,” he said.

In fact, many at Kashwere didn’t believe it at first. On Nov. 19, just days before the show aired, a producer phoned in the middle of a Kashwere staff meeting and informed the company that Winfrey was planning to highlight its robe. “She just said, ‘Oprah wants you,’ ” recalled Seltzer.

It turns out that Winfrey’s boyfriend, Stedman Graham, had given her one of the Kashwere robes to lift her spirits after a hard day. On the show, she told the story and gave vouchers for 350 robes to her audience.

Kashwere waited to see what the outcome would be. Several staff members didn’t expect much. Kashwere robes had been mentioned on the “Dr. Phil Show” before, and only a small number of sales came of it.

Still, Seltzer gathered his staff together prior to the airing and told them to prepare for hard work ahead. The producer warned the company to be ready for a deluge.

“We do make them aware of information we have gotten from companies in the past as it relates to sales and volume,” said Michelle McIntyre, a spokeswoman for Winfrey’s Harpo Productions Inc. “We advise companies that they need to be able to handle that volume.”

Kashwere is a wholesaler that sells robes and blankets made from a fabric that is soft like cashmere, but washable principally to high-end boutiques, hotels and spas. Since it sends large orders to a select list of customers, it’s not oriented to fill hundreds of orders for one or two robes, which is what it faced after the Oprah show.

The company had gone up to 18 workers from 12 over the year, but that wasn’t nearly enough. Seltzer called all available family members and friends, who worked in assembly-line fashion to pack boxes.

Seltzer bought everyone lunch as they worked. The pizzas weren’t so much a reward as a means of keeping the crew there.

But it quickly became clear that even with the extra workers, the company simply couldn’t keep up and simultaneously take care of its wholesale business. “We couldn’t pack these one and two orders all day long. Our commitment is to our wholesale accounts,” said Chris Roman, Kashwere’s executive vice president.

“The Oprah Winfrey Show” viewers didn’t want to hear it.

Some told stories of relatives who were on their death beds and their last wishes were to have those robes.

One customer told Roman that his wife might divorce him if he didn’t get the product. When the company did fulfill his order, he was so thrilled he sent her a $100 gift certificate to Amazon.com Inc. and a note that read: “Thank you so much for saving my Christmas.”

Others weren’t so nice. “People were so angry that they could not get it yesterday. It is a wonderful product, but it is not the Holy Grail,” Seltzer said. “It became apparent that people were so unrealistic, and that they thought we were like Nike or Microsoft and had hundreds of employees.”

Retailers that sold Kashwere products were also getting complaints. Francoise Shirley, founder of Minneapolis, Minn.-based Sleepyheads.com Inc., which sells Kashwere products at bathrobeshoppe.com, said she sold four times more Kashwere items in the holiday season of 2005 than she sold the year before. And she could have sold more.

“A lot of people understand when Oprah features something, the whole world wants it, and there is a limited supply,” she said. But she added, “There are some people that need to vent a little bit.”

Four days after the show aired, Seltzer decided he had to do something. He posted a note on the company’s Web site stating that the company was simply unable to fill any more orders.

Seltzer encouraged customers to be patient and directed them to retailers carrying Kashwere items. “We apologize that it was just not humanly possible to contact each and every customer who ordered Kashwere in the past few weeks and that we have not had the opportunity to get to everyone’s order yet. We did our very best!” he wrote.

The company has resumed filling orders, but there is still a backlog.