CoQH-CF Softgels | 100mg Ubiquinol Supplement

Thanks for the support! I try to be as open and honest with people as I can. Many people don't realize how things work in the background. Doing things right costs a lot of money. Paying American workers properly is very expensive. I've always been about quality first. If we can make the best product for the cheapest, great! However, if we just can't make the numbers work while keeping quality high, we always choose quality. Sometimes the prices other brands charge make absolutely no sense. We have seen some things where their retail price is lower than our cost! It makes me seriously question what is going on over there. I mean, you can cut some costs here and there. However, some things you just can't cut down any more.

We also tried to get into stores for a while, but we gave up once we figure out how the system works. To get in stores you need to be given the opportunity by a distributor. So it is very political with a lot of hand greasing. Well these distributors want 50% margins or more. So let's say you have a $20 retail product. The distributor wants $10 of that to just get you into the stores. They literally do nothing but stand in the middle between brands and stores... Then the store wants 30% margins or more, so that's $6. For that $20 product, you now are left with $4 that needs to cover the costs of the raw material, lab testing(which is rarely done properly), formulation, production, packaging, overheads, and brand margin. FOUR DOLLARS! Maybe you can get the distributor down to 40% and the store to 20% with some volume. MAYBE. That would leave you with $8 to actually make the product properly. However, then you run into other issues. Bigger brand that are already in stores will literally pay the distributors to not allow you into the store! That, or they threaten to pull their already selling product if they allow yours in. No distributor or store is going to pull a product already selling to put a new one that has no sales history in their store. This is not limited to just supplements, either. It's big in beer. What beer shows up in the fridges at stores is all a political game, too. Chips, soda, gum, etc... are all having to fit into this system. So what ends up happening is that these brands have to reduce the cost of the product to leave enough margins for this whole system. This means that brands in stores target much higher gross margins on a product by cutting corners on something. They need 75-85% margins to make the middle men margins work. The only way to do that is to use cheaper ingredients, skimp on lab testing, lower packaging costs, and then lower labor costs. So to compete with them, we would have to make major shifts to our operation to find the margins. Right now all our packaging is made here in the US. It's a US plastics company that we work with employing US workers. I would have to shift all our packaging to China to bring that down. We would have to do large runs in China, most likely at a factory polluting more than a US one, then ship them on container ships that also pollute like crazy. Then we would have to cut down on raw material costs. We would have to not go with the best suppliers that we have vetted and trust. We would have to go with the lowest priced ones. Then we would have to cut out lab costs, too. I certainly would not be able to run our own in-house analytical lab. Those overheads are way too much, so I would have to fire all my skilled high-paid scientists and shift to the cheapest 3rd party labs we could. Those labs would likely be setup for efficiency at the cost of all else. The quickest and least-costly methods would be employed to keep the numbers low, not the most accurate and scientifically-sound methods. This is even if the brand lab tested at all. Many don't, or do the bare minimum with skip-lot testing. That's where they test every 4th or 5th batch, not every single batch. Then I would have to reduce labor costs for production. If I wanted to keep it in-house, and stay in the US, I would have to move away from Tempe Arizona. I suppose I could keep it here, but I would have to start hiring based solely on who wanted to work for the least amount of money. Most brands do not even do production in-house like we do, though. They use contract manufacturers that are setup solely to manufacture for other brands. They would run it just like the cheap labs would: whatever it took to reduce costs. That shifts the shady practices off to another company, so the brands can play dumb if it is ever found out how things are actually run. Don't get me wrong, there are good contract manufacturers out there. They are just not the ones people use to reduce costs. I know, because we hire people all the time that have worked for other brands and contract manufacturers. They tell us how things are run at those places, and give us inside info on how they are reducing costs. There is a reason people come to work for us and stay working for us, and it's not because the other places treat them right. The contract manufacturers doing things right are much more expensive. So to even begin to compete, we would have to totally revamp our processes to reduce overhead. Then I would also need to start building relationships with these distributors, and probably wine and dine them a bit to even consider it. Then we would need to give them enough margins to get them into store, and give the stores enough margins to give us a good placement in the stores so that people would actually see them. All those end caps you see in stores? Those are paid for. Stores get paid extra by brands/distributors to have their products there instead of buried on a aisle in the back. Then if we successfully did all that, the products would have to move volume to stay there. If not, you often have to buy back the unsold units from the stores/distributors.

So that is a bit of insight into things. How products end up on the store shelves you see is pretty crazy. The amount of margins wasted on the people in the middle of customers and the brands is nuts. It's much better to have direct relationships and sales with customers like we do. Cut out the middle men that don't need to be there, and put all that margin into making the products better for customers. As much as I would love to see our stuff in stores, I am not willing to make the cuts needed to actually make that happen. I would rather build something that does things right, and that takes care of its employees, and build things the way we have been successful with to this point.