As you probably know, I’ve been working on a new product for the past few months.
It’s taken a long while to get here, but I think that’s got a lot to do with the fact it’s a food product.
I’m sure you can imagine… There’s a lot of regulation and due diligence required when you’re planning to sell something with the goal of feeding it to thousands of people.
It’s a novelty product so it’s not all about the food element, but I’ve done my best to make it taste great too!
The plan was to have launched by now, but we’ve had some pretty entertaining challenges so I thought we’d share some of them.
For some strange reason, fulfilment companies don’t like to list their actual prices in a way that’s easy to access… So before we could find out our actual shipping costs, we had to go through the whole process of registering an LLC. Which is a real pain if you’re not in the US! That’s a whole other story though (and a problem that someone seriously needs to fix).
After weeks of challenges. And waiting 3 weeks for something that we found out after 5 calls to the IRS could be done over the phone. Our shipping costs were DOUBLE what we estimated… Now this would suck for anyone, but keep in mind our product is only $15. So a big S&H cost was going to eat into our margins like crazy.
Bummer!
Needless to say, I was pretty disappointed. I was up until about 2am pushing the numbers around… Trying to come up with a solution where we still made money – without having to double our S&H.
Thankfully (with some help) I was able to make it work. It was a stressful exercise… but a huge relief to have it sorted!
Finally, we were ready to prepare for launch!
No such luck…
Instead, we got an email from the House of Cards production company. And now we’ve got some negotiating to do before we can start taking orders.
In the meantime, we still have an early-bird list at www.FreddysRibSauce.com.
We’re not going anywhere though. It’s just going to be a little longer before we can starting sending out Freddy’ Rib Sauce.
NB: our product and brand is in no way associated with or endorsed by House of Cards or Netflix.