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Correct. We were actually not even going to do a summer sale at all. It really came down to the wire, and we had to do a bunch of analysis and work to see if we could swing it. Just so everyone is aware, the supply chain is absolutely fucked because of this tariff shit. Even raw material inventory that was already in the US, and didn't have a tariff applied, have been raised in price by many of the suppliers. Some of them are profiteering, but others are just seeing that they are unlikely to be able to restock that material anytime soon, or without higher costs, so they adjust ahead of time to account for that. We have had to pivot on a lot of things to keep inventory levels steady, and were not even sure if running the sale would just deplete our inventory quicker and have us not be able to restock without massive price increases. My team and I scrambled, and we were able to get in a fairly okay position enough to do the sale, but it was 50/50 coming into it. In the end we were able to actually do the summer sale, launch the rewards program, and not have to do a price increase on the catalog. I realize many consumers don't fully understand the inner workings of things, but that was not a small feat with how the supply chain is going right now. Many people don't even realize that this is going to fuck up costs of other things that are not even part of the larger tariffs. This is because the normal flow of planes and shipping containers has been thrown into chaos again, very similar to what happened during COVID. Container traffic from China dropped 80%! That's massive for the products not coming it, but it is also massive for the logistics of how empty containers flow around the world to take other products places. This is causing a supply shock very similar to what we saw during the shutdowns in COVID. During that time, the cost to get a container from China went from $2,000 to $25,000. At least that had a real reason and explanation. This is just morons that have no idea how business or logistics work causing problems that don't need to exist.

News flash: the time to try to limit the loss of our manufacturing base was 15-20 years ago. We are way too far down that road to pivot now. The infrastructure just doesn't exist here anymore, to say nothing of the experienced workers that could actually run those operations. How many masters and PhD engineering candidates do you think are coming out of our universities into the manufacturing sector here? Very little. Everyone moved to other career paths when manufacturing was offshored. China spooled up, and has a whole pipeline of experienced manufacturing students coming out of school every year. Long gone are the days that China is just a place to manufacture cheap junk. They are the absolute top of the quality chain in many areas now. Our partners there can take on advanced science and engineering projects that nobody here in the US would even speak to us about, and they can do it in timelines that would make US companies just shake their heads at. Take our new cold water ultrasonic Tongkat extract. We put multiple cutting edge processing steps into that extract that hadn't been applied to Tongkat before. Our partners in China were able to do that and optimizes the process not just well, but for costs where we could make it work. Nobody in the US even has the machines to be able to do it, much less would be willing to take on the risk and cost of it without massively increasing prices or upfront outlays. Our partners in China just went to work, collaborated with our science team in the lab to optimize, and pulled it off in record time. Even some of the testing we were doing used very new equipment almost nobody has. Our Chinese partners didn't have one of them in their facility, but the owners brother did at his facility across town. So they just went over there for that step and got it done. That shit just doesn't happen here in the US anymore. The whole infrastructure is gone. If we want it back, it will take a decade or more to get where China is now. Adding tariffs are not going to do shit but increase cost for US consumers and put us further behind China in the end. This idiotic idea that China is still this poor backwater place making cheap plastic junk, and they need us more than we need them, is a trope from a decade ago. They have gone way past us in many ways, and it will be US consumers in the end that learn that hard lesson from the actions this administration is taking. Hell, we have raw materials being grown for us all over the world, and we STILL SHIP THEM TO CHINA TO EXTRACT! That's not just because of cost. It's because they are better at it than everyone else, and we need to start admitting that if we are ever going to try to make changes to bring that sort of knowledge and tech back to the US. Trust me, I have been working very hard in the background to price and plan out a whole extraction facility here. It's very eye-opening when you get down into the details. I'd have to have the equipment we need made for us, and literally the only place that could do it would be China anyway. Any equipment that is already here, or made here, would be at least 3-4X the cost, and still not have the quality or technical control we would have in China. I'd have to spend at least $5M to set this facility up, and would likely not start getting production batches out of it for at least a year, when I could just have our partners in China do it in a few weeks for us for no upfront overlay. People need to wake the fuck up to the reality of the situation. China is beyond us in a lot of ways now, and crying about it isn't going to change anything. Anyway, now I am ranting...

Now you are going to be earning points on the entire order you make during the sale, not just extra off Natrium. So we had to factor that into the cost calculations. I think that system is going to be a lot better for everyone over time. I know change is scary and annoying sometimes, but this rewards system is going to give people more chances to earn cash to spend on supplements throughout the year, rather than just waiting till summer or Black Friday. People will get cash for their birthday, cash for inviting new people who don't know about us, and some more ways to earn that will will launch soon... on top of earning on spend during sales. We had a slight dip in new product releases there for a bit, but now we are getting back on our normal schedule. So a bunch more new products are going to be coming out, and this system is going to allow people to use points to try those new products without having to wait for the big sales.

Also, some inside info: Natrium is going to be going away soon. Not the products! Those are sticking around. However, the brand itself will be. Nobody refers to Natrium for anything. They just see them as ND products. Natrium is ND at this point, so why have confusion for new customers at all? We are doing a larger rebrand and packaging redesign of all ND products right now, and as part of that, Natrium is going to just be absorbed by the ND brand altogether. Even the lines for why something is in a Natrium bottle or an ND bottle have been blurred over time, so it is only causing confusion that doesn't need to be there.