As some of you may have noticed we’ve run into some serious stock problems since the beginning of March. What happened? Are we going out of business? When will things go back to normal, and when will we have stock from our regular supplier, or even just a better strain selection? If you don’t want to read this lengthy post, the short answers are: we’re hopefully not going out of business, we should be over the worst part of the hump, and things should be getting better in about a month or two. For those of you that do want to know more about the situation, let’s dig in.
Our regular supplier, the one we get the Moderns, the Green Ranah, the Premium JK from, the one who’s been our main supplier since about a year and a half after starting the business, is named Henry. He’s a small-scale supplier, and we’re a small-scale buyer. The problem is the kratom shipping industry has gotten a lot more difficult since we started. All the major shipping companies refuse to ship kratom at this point, and most won’t even take any kind of powdered product from Indonesia to the US. When it gets here, the FDA has the power to seize any shipment if it’s not done exactly right. So, to get kratom here we go through small forwarding companies that are willing to handle kratom specifically. The problem is Herny is a small-scale supplier and we’re a small-scale buyer. Most kratom vendors buy kratom starting by the metric ton (1000 kilos). We buy in multiples of 100. Shipping kratom here is a competitive business, and the big suppliers in Indonesia are shipping tons every day, even whole shipping containers. Because we’re small and it’s a competitive business we tend to get bumped into the back of the line by forwarding companies. There are only so many spots to ship kratom, and it makes more financial sense for them to service companies that ship 3000 or more kilos than our 200.
To get around this we found a second supplier which is a bigger one. Who can get us our orders in a matter of weeks instead of months and tends to at least get decent kratom. Like most of our customers, we prefer Henry’s kratom too. Don’t get me wrong, some of it from the bigger supplier is great, and it’s almost all solid quality. The thing is, it’s a little more random because they buy from multiple farms. So even the different color strains from the same batch can be different kratom. Henrys all comes from the same trees, at the same time, every time, and best of all he stocks up before the rainy season starts so we never have to get any of the weak rainy season kratom. Certainly, some of his batches are better and some are worse.
Which leads us to the next part of the problem. We do significantly more sales in the first couple weeks of getting batch in than we do afterward whether we bought six months’ worth of kratom or one. Basically, everything we earn in the first weeks goes to pay for the next batch or paying off the one we’ve just received. After that we’re barely making cost of living, and the cost of living has increased a lot in the last four years. Which means that if we buy a larger supply, we have an awful time paying for it or the next one, but if we buy a smaller batch we’ll run out before the next one arrives. So, one of the things we’re trying to nail down is ordering the exact batch size that we can pay for but won’t run out before the next one gets here.
Unfortunately, one of the few products that hasn’t gone up in cost is kratom. So, we can’t make up the difference by raising prices. I know Henry’s been feeling the pinch in the last four years. Inflation isn’t just happening in the US. It’s a global problem. Coupled that with, since 2020 there’s been a lot of big money entering the supply side of kratom. The biggest suppliers can buy massive amounts of cheap kratom for next to nothing and sell it for next to nothing. Which means there’s been a constant downward pressure on the price of kratom. Henry pays more for better leaf, and it costs more to process it.
Because of this over the last four years we’ve been relying more and more on either personal credit with Henry or credit cards to pay for orders and fill the gap between selling something and getting paid. This came to a head in early March when we ran out of stock and credit at the same time. Compound that with it can take two weeks from the day we make a sale until Waave pays it out, and the regular problems with shipping times and you get what we got. Small batches with few strains, and long complete outages between batches.
We are over the hump now though. Things should start getting better and strain selection and order sizes are on the increase. Basically, we’re using all the money from sales to fund more stock and temporarily meeting our cost of living through other means. While we’re undoubtably going to sell out of batch #74 before getting the next one in. It shouldn’t be nearly as long as between the last one. We have a batch coming from Henry now that’s almost here and will be getting more from both suppliers soon. Strain selection is only going to improve. We’re estimating at least one to two months before things should start getting back to normal, but they’ll be constantly improving along the way.
There it is. That’s our situation. We’re not going out of business, but we are going to be running on the edge for a while. I know we’ve been getting a lot of emails asking what’s going on, and there’s been so many that I haven’t been able to do justice to an answer. We’ve been doing this for 8 years now. We ship six days a week and work all seven. You can’t do that without recognizing every customer by name, what strains and colors they like, how long they’ve been a customer, when someone’s a new customer, or even when a customer we haven’t seen in years comes back. So, we did feel we owed you all an explanation. After 8 years I also know the kratom business is entirely about perseverance in the face of crisis. Losing processing accounts, delayed, and even seized shipments are the norm. We certainly know about the urge to quit when disaster strikes, you’re working around the clock trying to solve it, and you’re just sick of doing this. We’ve survived worse than this, and still have many more rounds in us. We’re still here! To anyone that took the time to read this thank you, and we hope this answered your questions.
Thank you,
Treasure House Botanicals,
Ben & Lindsay
