Comment · Sat, October 23, 2021 · ND Owner
Reddit AMA | In-House Lab Edition
Original post in this thread
NootropicsDepotGuru · 77 points
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We are very excited to announce that Nootropics Depot will be conducting its first-ever Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything), which is a semi-live Q&A session, about our In-House Analytical Laboratory and we would love for you to join us! See below for full details and get your question(s) ready. We hope to see you there!
WHEN
STARTS: October 20th | 9am AZ MST
ENDS: October 22nd | 9am AZ M…
What they were answering
Djc112800 · 1 points
how has this pandemic affected your company? How long did it take to build that lab?
u/MisterYouAreSoDumb · ND Owner
Ohh man, the pandemic has been one of the most challenging things to get through since I started the company in 2013. It has affected almost every aspect of our operations. We put a pandemic response plan in place in March 2020 at the start of things getting bad. This has been in place ever since. Everyone wears masks while in our facilities. We have rapid testing kits to test for people if they feel sick. Everyone knows if they feel sick that they are not to enter our facility till they feel better and have 2 consecutive negative tests. It's better to err on the side of caution than to get 5 more people sick by coming in, so we ensure everyone takes that seriously. The economy has been strange since the pandemic started. We saw big drops in sales at first, then massive upticks in sales as stimulus checks went out. This made it hard to predict and build units, because we had no idea what sales would be from month-to-month. Then the supply shortages came. Then the shipping breakdowns happened. Now we are dealing with a supply chain that is more fucked than I have ever seen in my life. We are talking some ingredients doubling and tripling in price overnight. Some ingredients are increasing in price every month or two. A shipping container that used to cost $2,000-$3,000 to get from China before the pandemic started is costing as much as $25,000 now! If you get your container on a ship, it might sit off the port for 90 days before it is unloaded. Air freight has increased 4-5X in price. Trump put in tariffs that are as much as 33% for some HS codes, and I guess Biden wants to keep them in place. This means you have to add in up to 33% ON TOP OF the new higher prices. So if a raw material triples in price, you have to pay 33% of that tripled price PLUS the increased shipping costs. It's absolute madness out there, and things cannot continue on much longer like this. We are heading towards massive systemic breakdowns if things don't cool off soon.
We have been building up our lab over the past 6 years. It's been constantly expanding since 2015. We are expanding more rapidly these days because of our size, but I have been growing it constantly for years.