John Roman

That's possibly eight different vendors, eight different purchase orders, eight different things being manufactured somewhere, whether it's stateside, whether it's in China, whether it's in Italy, going to have to go in a boat.

That allows eight choke points.

And if a single choke point happens, the entire box is in peril, which is absolutely brutal.

There's scenarios where we've had it in the past where three weeks out, we're getting a heads up for the first time.

and something is due in three weeks to our door a month before the box goes out and they're like hey we're not gonna hit this time frame okay well what do we do right so we've come up with some things that we put in place where we typically try to have in our warehouses already a replacement product for each yeah like filler type items that yeah um where it still passes the it still went through the the regular process but we have 12 000 of them sitting there in case of

One of these scenarios, the biggest hurdle issue we did is we brought back themes, which made what I just described very difficult because it's got to fit in the theme, which means we just have to have more, more supply chain funnel, more options because no one ever has the quantity we need sitting on a shelf.

It just doesn't exist anymore.

Yeah, back in 2015, we were sometimes ordering stuff after we had already renewed the box.

We knew the exact amount we needed, and it was sitting three states over and was a quick trip to get it.

So the scale has definitely changed things and made it pretty anxiety-ridden at times.

No, we've absolutely messed up.

To be fair, the process that I described that has been in place now since 2021, late 2021, since that's been in place, we haven't had one of those moments.

And we have enough checks and balance where we won't.

There'll still be crazy scenarios where something is in route and it's going to be three days late.

And that's going to put us three days behind on kitting and shipping.

So we might have to communicate to customers, hey, your box might leave two days later than planned.

Those scenarios might still occur, but the big uh-oh moments won't.

I think of two in particular.

One, this is a long time ago, was called, I'm going to Google it.

It was Mission 26.