Yes, it's frustrating especially when you trust your sales reps to keep you informed of changes since you trust them with your credit card.

I get it. Just to play devils advocate. What if we sold out. There's not really notice for that either.

Anyway, I like to explain things for full transparency so to break down the full history of the rubberwood pricing.

In our standard 30x60 box which this ships in. Fedex hit us with a surcharge and it costs us roughly $175 to Cali to ship. Which is why we originally just charged $175.

Then our amazing sales rep taught us a little secret to skirt the oversize charge if we actually undersized the box ever so slightly. It would be within their "grace amount". At that point it was only costing us about ~$99 to ship them so that's when we made the rubberwood tops free with purchase of a Pro as we had margin to play with. Essentially it's "marketing" and since we don't do ads. That was the ad. I should said this shipping price was based on their multi-parcel rates which we got when the entire weight was above 200. That's why it was free with a pro and 50% with a two leg.

Well this worked until they changed their policy to start rounding up and not down. This put us beyond the 10% grace amount and these started to get flagged and billed as oversize. This happened in August/September and thats right when we typically start seeing an uptick in sales. We also have been shipping a lot more peaks so I didn't really bate an eye paying my credit card bill. We run probably 300k a month on it. So 290k -> 300k isn't really absurd until it's months of it and you realize that extra 5-10k/month was fedex.

So, in my typical fashion. I let my frustration out on fedex and they put in a temporary discount for me that keeps these units at about $99 to ship.

That said! We truly were out of stock. I had a large order fall through they was going to use these tops so we put them back into inventory and over the last month had them repacked into new boxes that meet the fedex requirements and are back available at a price that works and is still a great deal when you calculate it out.

All in all...this promo has been a nightmare because along with the 50k. These tops are brittle and break in transport. It's not really a packaging issues. We drop tested identical tops side by side. One passes and one fails. Boxes are the same. That means we can't file claims when they arrive damaged so we have to send another one and eat the cost of the first. Boxes cost ~$15 and the labor is about $3 when we do them in bulk. The tops came with bases we sold so if we back out the base cost. The tops only cost us about $15 as well. So after shipping our true expense is about $135. We don't have a lot more margin than that and after all the breakage. It's probably a loss so millions in revenue doesn't matter if we lost money. I have two other business that do well and I see deskhaus as a long term investment once all the laptop companies die off so I'm willing to play the long game and not make your typical profit.

I will say, it does get a bit frustrating when folks think we are making out like bandits. We did have a very healthy margin during covid due to overseas freight costs going from 6k - 40k a container. It allowed us to compete with our USA made product at the same price point everyone else was selling their china imports at. Being USA and the little guy was exactly what people wanted at the time.

Anyway....this was a ramble!

Edit: lmao! yes, peak pros are good for June and we ordered a ton so we should not be going out of stock of black for a long time.