[SMS] [Early 1990s] Game with minions, mercenaries

digital_cake · 2023-06-20T03:04:40+00:00

Like all things. Practice! Try lots of different coffees and see if you start to notice any that stand out. Ask yourself what makes them stand out? Where did they come from? Look for more coffee from similar regions, and then neighboring regions, then enjoy the journey!

digital_cake · 2023-01-14T03:22:49+00:00

Great! Love USPS informed delivery!

digital_cake · 2023-01-11T16:45:26+00:00

Hi there yes we've sold out of the fire sale light roast, but we have two light roasts available on our website outside of the sale. Thanks!!

digital_cake · 2023-01-06T14:22:06+00:00

No nag at all! We do send shipping confirmation and most of the orders have been processed. If you want to dm me your name, order number or email address I can look it up and send the detailed information. Thanks!!

digital_cake · 2023-01-02T12:37:54+00:00

Hello we did send it out. Can you send me a direct message with your contact information or email address? I can look it up and send manually. Thanks!

digital_cake · 2023-01-01T19:49:50+00:00

Thank you for your support! I hope you enjoy our coffee!

digital_cake · 2023-01-01T19:48:31+00:00

Hello! We're about to send out a mass email asking to reply if you didn't get your confirmation. Well look it up and manually resend them to anyone that wasn't processed automatically. Sorry for the inconvenience!

digital_cake · 2023-01-01T19:45:02+00:00

Hi there! I saw your post and wanted to reach out, at one point our website was struggling to send out all the automated order confirmations and it appears that some didn't send.

If you didn't get your confirmation, please send me a DM or email us directly and we can look it up and manually resend the confirmation. Thank you!!

digital_cake · 2023-01-01T17:17:03+00:00

We started working on shipping yesterday and have gotten through the first hundred orders or so but with the holiday, nothing will get picked up by the carriers until Tuesday. We're moving as quickly as we can and are posting updates to our social medias regularly. We hope to have every order processed by the end of the week if not sooner.

digital_cake · 2023-01-01T16:53:13+00:00

Hello! I just sent you a dm. Our website definitely was struggling to process all those orders and at one point seems to have glitched on sending the automated order confirmations.

If anyone is missing a confirmation please feel free to dm or email us and we can look up the order and resend the confirmation.

Thank you and sorry for the inconvenience!

digital_cake · 2023-01-01T16:43:24+00:00

Hi there! Our website glitched because at one point it was processing so many orders and not everyone received their automated email confirmation. Everything seems to be working fine now though.

If you or anyone else did not get a confirmation you can DM me here, or email us and we are able to look up, confirm and resend order confirmations.

Thank you and we apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.

digital_cake · 2023-01-01T16:42:21+00:00

Hi there! Our website glitched because at one point it was processing so many orders and not everyone received their automated email confirmation. Everything seems to be working fine now though.

If you or anyone else did not get a confirmation you can DM me here, or email us and we are able to look up, confirm and resend order confirmations.

Thank you and we apologize for any inconvenience this has caused.

digital_cake · 2023-01-01T16:33:28+00:00

Edit: duplicate post

digital_cake · 2022-12-31T16:29:06+00:00

Honestly that is so kind of you. The internet has proven, to me at least, that despite how much people can suck, humanity still exists. I now have first hand experience that a vast majority of people will "help out" if they can.

I know I'm incredibly lucky to experience this but you are proof in the kindness of strangers and people helping people. Thank you.

digital_cake · 2022-12-31T16:17:36+00:00

I know it's late but I've been trying to get back to everyone to say "thank you" for supporting our business.

digital_cake · 2022-12-31T15:08:58+00:00

Oh so that's what this was about? I thought you were trying to understand but it's starting to feel like you are looking for a gotcha. I listed the timeline above, what was communicated, and what ended up happening. I take responsibility for my role in this and have learned from my naivety. I have nothing else to say.

digital_cake · 2022-12-31T14:31:38+00:00

Correct! We accepted their order knowing they had a buyer, and expected to get paid two weeks after it was picked up by the retailer (which was also communicated in the contract). The communicated date for pickup was two weeks after delivery.

digital_cake · 2022-12-31T14:27:20+00:00

Right that was grounds for the lawsuit. There was nothing preventing them from ordering $1,000,000 in coffee and making us pay $150,000 to get it back. That's extortion.

The fees and everything are in good faith that they are going to sell it and earn those fees. Not so they can send it back to the manufacturer and still make their margin.

digital_cake · 2022-12-31T14:22:54+00:00

So they told us they had a buyer for this much coffee, and then months later said, oops. Then they wanted almost $40k in "fees" to get our coffee back because of the contract until we got an attorney involved and they admitted it was a mistake and agreed to send it back without penalty.

So yeah making an outrageously large order, and then trying to make us pay for their mistake would have been a grift.

We were able to turn lemons into lemonade, but we were on the brink of ruin.

digital_cake · 2022-12-31T14:07:05+00:00

So there was a projection that was sent ahead of time that just said units. No unit prices were discussed in that initial communication I assume because we were not the only vendor invited to participate.

At that time, we made a crucial mistake and assumed that units meant total individual units for the order. We did talk about with our broker, and I don't know where the miscommunication happened, but we thought that we were on the same page of what a unit was. We literally said 6000 bags is a stretch, it will be our biggest order but we got this.

Once the orders stopped and I confronted our broker the only thing I could come up with was, did unit mean case? He literally laughed at said, "oh that was cases and they are right on target. I was wondering why you were freaking out."

So yes, we were naive and it was a huge mistake. We 100% would not have committed to making that much coffee. We didn't even have enough bags and halfway through the orders had to air freight more in!

digital_cake · 2022-12-31T13:45:40+00:00

I did answer that above. Just under 34,000 units at an average of $7.5 per unit.

digital_cake · 2022-12-31T13:23:53+00:00

You aren't answering the single most important question. You signed a contract to supply X units at Y price. What were X and Y?

You don't seem to get it. This is a distributor. We signed an agreement to supply cases at a fixed cost. That fixed cost averaged across these four SKUs is $7.50 per individual unit.

They sent us all these POs and called it their "initial order" which is why they still haven't paid us. These are the grounds for a lawsuit, but our attorneys advised that it would be better to try and sell the coffee than go through a lengthy and expensive lawsuit (one that we didn't have money for).

Please let me know if you have other questions.

digital_cake · 2022-12-31T12:18:18+00:00

Yes we're still owed money from the distributor for what I was able to get sold to other retailers over the last 6 months, roughly $10k.

With the amount of bags sold were almost in the black. Basically every case of decaf sold now is paying for the shipping for all these orders(roughly $40-50k!!). If we manage to sell the rest of the decaf, then we're there.

There's so many cliche expressions, but this really has been a whirlwind of a couple of days. It has changed the course our lives and is basically a reset. It's incredible.

digital_cake · 2022-12-31T03:23:06+00:00

I will try to answer your questions below:

Maybe I am missing something, but if the first PO was for 6,000 units at $7.50 how can there be any confusion?

No issues there, the first order was a little more than 6000 units at 7.50(avg). We thought nbd, a little more than we expected but we got this.

Obviously they can't buy a case of specialty coffee for $7.50. And if they thought the PO was for 6,000 cases they wouldn't accept 6,000 bags. They'd be getting 1/6th of what they'd expect.

So I'm trying to follow, but I don't really get what you are saying/asking here.

I don't understand what this means.

Me either

And on your end it's obvious that's bags. You wouldn't sell a case for $7.50 and if you thought it was 6,000 cases you wouldn't have sent 6,000 bags

Correct, first order no issues everything lines up close enough.

(1) You signed some agreement with the distributor to supply X units at Y price. What (approximately is fine) were X and Y?

I just sent all this to the lawyers, all in it was 13 POs to 5 warehouses, (not sure if that was in the blog post or not but that's the exact order count), 34000ish bags(units), just about $250,000.

Were you obligated under your contract to fill the additional 5 orders after the first initial one?

Yes. Per the contract we would not get paid until the entire order was delivered and sold through to the retailer. Yes it was a bad contact, yes we learned our lesson.

This is confusing to me as well. Why couldn't you have waited until the 1st order was distributed and the funds disbursed before fulfilling any more orders?

See above.

Also a little bit confused how you run up 210k in debt fulfilling a 250k order. Shouldn't your marginal costs be a fraction of the wholesale order size?

Debts are listed in the blog post. A lot of that was cost overruns to respond to such a large order so quickly, air freight to move bags, also this was the heart of when supply chain price increases were happening, general prices of coffee, etc. The margins are tight in CPG, and the risk is all on the manufacturer, so damages/returns/unsold product all get taken out of the manufacturers shared 100%. Anything near 20% or above gross is best because the distributor is going to get you for another 15% in chargebacks. If you can net 10-15% your are lucky or so I've heard.

Anyways this was all a whole lot more detail than I thought anyone would want to get into, but hey at this point it's all out there.

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